


Into Warmer Air

by Carrionflower



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: All the paladins are counselors, Eventual Sex, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Fluff, Keith is a prickly hedgehog, M/M, Mentions of Keith's shitty childhood, Minor drug use/drinking, Pidge + Shiro Friendship, Ponytail Keith, Slow Build, Summer Camp AU, Wet T-Shirt Shiro
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-25 10:46:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7529674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrionflower/pseuds/Carrionflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A summer job as a camp counselor in upstate New York, $250 a week, three meals a day, and a place to sleep. Even though Keith wasn’t overly fond of children, he did enjoy having more than thirty-two cents in his bank account, so he sublet his shitty studio apartment, gassed up his car, and made the four-hour drive.</p><p>He'd been under the impression he’d be getting paid to mostly sit in the sun and keep a handful of dumb kids from eating poisonous berries or whatever. He didn’t realize he’d actually have to <i>participate</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I adore goofy, sugar-sweet AUs. One day my brain started banging pots and pans whilst screaming "SHIRO! SHIRO AS A _CAMP COUNSELOR!_ " and it just... never stopped.
> 
> I worked at a summer camp for several years, so much of this is a fond homage to that awful, sweaty, joyous chaos.

Altea Sleepaway Camp was nestled in an idyllic valley, its 150 acres of woodland cradled by rolling mountains and run through with creeks that fed out into a massive lake. The campground itself was arranged a circular shape with facilities at one end, cabins on the other, and a wide grassy clearing in the center. At the height of summer, that clearing would be packed with young campers, sunburnt and giddy, sitting side by side while they listened to morning announcements. Right now, however, it was silent save the occasional chirp of a bird rousing itself from sleep and preening the dawn dew from its feathers.

A bluejay took to the air squawking indignantly as the quiet was ruined by the choke and sputter of an engine. A little beige hatchback spun its wheels on the wide dirt road and pulled in haphazardly amongst the trees, and a figure stumbled out of the driver’s side door, red hoodie pulled up over dark hair.

“Coming through!” Keith panted, brushing past a knot of half-awake staff and sprinting for the director’s office, trampling flowers as he went. “‘Scuse me!”

When Keith burst through the screen door and let it slap shut behind him, the two strangers in the room fixed him with surprised stares, and he tried on an apologetic smile. Judging by the reaction, it probably looked a little disconcerting on him. He was sweaty, out of breath, and disheveled. Maybe a little frantic. He _really_ needed this job. Or, more accurately, the paycheck that came with it.

“I’m really sorry,” he said, holding up the crumpled, coffee-stained map in his fist and pushing back his hood. “I got so lost, and none of the roads are labeled, there was no one to ask for directions, I couldn’t get cell service, and my car is -- well, my car is barely hanging on to life at this point so I’m honestly shocked it survived the trip, but it did, and I’m here.”

_Wait. Fuck. I missed a step._

“I’m, uh.” He cleared his throat. “I’m Keith. By the way.”

“Hello, Keith, and welcome to Altea,” the camp director said. He knew she was the camp director because he recognized her voice right away -- smooth, accented, and lovely. They’d spoken on the phone when he called about the job offer posted on Craigslist: eight weeks as a camp counselor in upstate New York, two hundred and fifty bucks a week, three meals a day, and a place to sleep. Even though Keith wasn’t overly fond of kids, he _did_ enjoy having more than thirty-two cents in his bank account, so he sublet his shitty studio apartment, gassed up his car, and made the four-hour drive.

And now he was over an hour late. On his first day.

The director stood up, twisting her long hair into a pale bun atop her head and reaching for Keith’s hand. “I’m Allura,” she said.

“I know,” Keith told her, then remembered he was supposed to shake her hand, so he did. “We’ve spoken.”

“Yes, we have,” she said with a smile. “I like to talk to all my staff personally, and I’m glad to finally meet you. Come in, sit down. Catch your breath.”

Allura’s cabin was the biggest one in the valley, housing the functional heart of Camp Altea -- the paper-strewn chaos of the ground floor served as the administration office -- and Allura oversaw her kingdom from her regal perch behind a broad wood-paneled desk. Standing dutifully aside was a man wearing pleated khaki shorts and a neatly-groomed mustache.

“This is my co-director and right-hand man, Coran,” Allura said, pulling out a rickety chair and gesturing for Keith to take it.

“A pleasure, a pleasure!” Coran crowed, pumping Keith’s hand with relish. “First day of camp starts bright and early tomorrow morning, so we’ll all be busy little bees for the next 24 hours. Your colleagues have already been briefed and given tasks, so let’s get you caught up, shall we?”

When he sat in it, Keith’s chair made a sound like it was on the verge of crumbling into matchsticks, so he stood back up awkwardly. “Yeah, sure. Just… point me in the right direction and tell me what to do.”

“Well!” Coran bent over the desk and fished out a poorly-stapled stack of papers. “Here’s your employee handbook, as it were. It has your cabin assignment, the names of your campers, and your daily schedule, as well as our code of conduct. Lots of safety information, too.”

His name was scrawled across the top: _KEITH KOGANE, RED CABIN._ He tilted his head as he flipped through the leaflet. “Section 2 is just a picture of poison ivy copied and pasted twelve times.”

“Ah, hm. Yes.” Coran scratched his chin. “There’s quite a bit of the stuff around the edges of the campground, so we want to be sure everyone is properly informed. Last summer, we had an unfortunate mishap with a number of counselors who, er, were not able to readily identify poison ivy.”

“Don’t wipe your ass with it, if you’ll pardon my French,” Allura said briskly, sliding two more sheets of paper across the desk toward Keith. “Here’s your employment contract, as well as a waiver stating that Camp Altea isn’t responsible if you fall into one of our campfires or drown in the lake -- the usual legal stuff. Take your time and look it over.”

Keith signed it all without reading it and handed it back, and Allura frowned slightly, then shrugged and shuffled the documents into a bulging accordion folder that looked like it weighed as much as she did (and was probably older than her, too).

“Our cabins are color-coded,” she said, struggling to stuff the folder back into her desk drawer. “Easier for the campers to remember. You’ll be overseeing our red cabin for the next eight weeks. During the day, your troop will be your responsibility, but you’re free to do as you like in the evenings. After lights-out on the weekends, you may take excursions into town for recreational purposes, provided you’re back before midnight.”

“No drinking or smoking in front of the campers,” Coran continued, seamlessly picking up where Allura left off. Keith got the impression they’d given this speech many, many times. “No coarse language, no illicit drug use, and no reckless behavior that might endanger a child’s safety. Cabins will be inspected for cleanliness every Monday morning, and your troop will be given extra chores if you fail.”

“Any questions?” Allura finished, leaning her elbows on the desk and giving Keith a gentle smile.

“Uh,” Keith said. “I don’t think so, no.”

“Then let’s get right to it!” Allura rose to her feet and breezed out the door with Coran on her heels, and Keith followed, still holding on to both his road map and the stack of papers. She pointed to various landmarks as she marched them across the grounds. Mess hall, kitchens, infirmary, staff cabins, showers. Archery range, baseball diamond, swimming hole. This path led to the lake, that path led to the barn, and the other one -- neglected and half-buried under shrubbery -- led across the river.

“What’s across the river?” Keith asked.

Allura made a face like she’d tasted something sour. “Camp Galra.”

“Awful bunch,” Coran grumbled. “Their director’s got sand in his shorts because he doesn’t like sharing the valley with us; he’d rather have the whole thing to himself so he can expand. For the last few summers, they’ve been hassling us, trying to push us out --”

“But we’re not budging.” Allura put her hands on her hips and stared fiercely over the river. Keith squinted, looking into the woods, but it was too far to see anything except a banner that said _GO GALRA_ in obnoxious purple letters. “This half of the valley belonged to my father for years. He gave it to me before he died, and I intend to make him proud.”

Coran patted Allura’s shoulder. “I dare say you already have. This place was a mess when you inherited it, and look at it now. Tip-top shape! Wouldn’t you agree, Keith?”

Keith wasn’t sure he would use “tip-top” to describe anything about the place -- it could use a coat of fresh paint, or possibly an entire renovation -- but he nodded anyhow. “Never seen anything like it.”

(This was technically true. He’d never been to a summer camp before in his life.)

Someone ambled by with an armful of firewood and a wide-brimmed straw hat balanced precariously on wild hair.

“Oh!” Allura exclaimed, easily lifting the bulky logs. “Pidge! This is Keith, our late arrival. He missed this morning’s meeting.”

Pidge turned around and tipped back her straw hat to look up at him, sizing him up. She had a thick stripe of sunblock down the bridge of her nose and several smudges of it on her glasses. “We were wondering when you’d show up,” she said.

He shrugged, self-conscious. “I spent a few hours driving the wrong way down the highway. Can’t read a map to save my life.”

“Really?” She raised her eyebrows and leaned in. “D’you wanna learn? I can teach you! Actually, hey, my dad taught me a cool trick -- if you’re ever lost and you need to find magnetic north, just set your watch against the sun like this --”

Keith didn’t wear a watch.

“Pidge is our wilderness survival expert,” Allura said. “There’s a lot of knowledge stuffed in that little head. This firewood is headed out to the barn, isn’t it? I’ll go with you.”

Pidge beamed.

The sun was climbing higher in the sky and the air was warming up, the morning mist having long dissipated. The campground was coming alive, too, with groups of staff bustling to get ready for tomorrow morning’s deluge of screaming children. Keith dodged two girls in Camp Altea t-shirts hauling a kayak and narrowly avoided an oar to the face. Across the field, someone was hammering a welcome sign to a beribboned pole, and a stream of people filtered in and out of the kitchens carrying propane tanks and industrial-sized jars of ketchup. Allura took the east path to the barn, hefting the cord of firewood in her arms, while Pidge talked animatedly beside her.

“There they are,” Coran said proudly as he and Keith crested a small slope in the opposite direction. “Our beautiful cabins. Take in all that rustic glory.”

The cabins were clearly hand-built, raised slightly off the ground on short stilts, and were hardly more than sturdy wooden frames left mostly open to the air. Narrow cots hung with mosquito netting were tucked in each of the four corners, and every cabin was fitted with a colored canvas tarp roof -- he spotted blue, yellow, green, black, and red.

“Is that mine?” he asked, pointing at the last in line. “The red one.”

“None other than,” Coran said. “Let’s see how the old girl is holding up.” He took off at an excited canter toward the red-roofed cabin.

Keith tagged along at a more leisurely pace. “Not much privacy,” he observed, sticking his head through one of the open walls.

“Oh, you’ll get used to it in no time. After all, there’s not much privacy anywhere else on the campground, either -- communal showers, communal toilets, communal dining hall…”

“Hang on. If I’m sleeping out here, then what are those staff cabins for?” Keith jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the little cluster of whitewashed cabins with actual walls and actual roofs.

“Senior staff only,” Coran told him, brushing splinters off the mud-stained floor and smoothing the starched white sheets on one of the cots. “Our head counselors have beds there…” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and waggled his eyebrows. “…Though I have heard they’ll trade off with you for a night or two if you ask politely. Private toilet and everything. Very cushy.”

Immediately, Keith wrote that off as a lost cause and resigned himself to sleeping under a mosquito net and pissing outside for the next eight weeks. Politeness was not really a skill in his repertoire, and even if it _had_ been, people just… didn’t like him very much. He’d stopped trying to figure out why; all he knew is that he was used to being picked last for dodgeball, used to birthday party invites getting lost in the mail -- used to being passed on, overlooked, shut out. The idea of sucking up to senior staff didn’t appeal to him, even if it _did_ mean he’d be able to take a dump in relative peace and isolation.

Beyond the first row of cabins, there were several more, all color-coded with garish tarp roofs. Pink, purple, orange, two more blues, three different shades of green… The whole scene looked like an unfinished page from a coloring book, or a jumbled box of crayons. Keith was endlessly grateful he was simply the red cabin, rather than something fussy like burnt umber or midnight indigo.

Coran shooed him down the crooked steps out of his cabin and back towards the field. “All right, off we go,” he prompted. “You’ll want to see the kitchens, I’m sure, and then the lake. Everyone always wants to see the lake.”

Keith actually wasn’t terribly interested in either of these things, but he was getting paid $250 a week to pretend like he was, so he put his head down and kept following Coran.

The dining hall was cavernous, built with huge slabs of knotty pine and filled by dozens of long tables. The place could easily seat two or three hundred people, but it was nearly empty at the moment save for a few folks sorting silverware into bins or sprawling sweatily in chairs.

Coran straightened a few of the seats compulsively as he talked. “Mealtimes are 8 a.m., noon and 6 p.m., though the dining hall stays open until 9 in the evening to accommodate a little bit of late-night snacking. We have a consulting chef on hand this year, so our menu is considerably expanded.”

Keith raised an eyebrow. “Consulting chef?”

“Well… Our swimming instructor is actually a culinary school graduate,” Coran admitted. “Top marks and everything, I’m told. All of our chef positions are filled and he was too overqualified for us to hire him as entry-level kitchen staff, so we offered him a bonus if he’d help our head chef, ah, _broaden her horizons_ beyond meatloaf and canned peas.”

Two sets of large swinging doors led from the dining hall into the stainless steel interior of the kitchens, and compared to the quiet outside, it was chaos. Cooks were dicing, peeling and chopping, burners were lit, pots were boiling, fridges were in the process of being stocked, and someone was mopping up a spill that both looked and smelled like cat puke.

“Ah, speak of the devil,” Coran said. “Our consulting chef in the flesh. Hunk, this is Keith, a fresh face on Team Altea.”

Tucking the mop into the crook of his elbow and scrubbing sticky sweat out of his eyes, Hunk raised a hand in greeting, then gestured to the madness that surrounded them. “Hey, man. Welcome to the Thunderdome. First time?”

“I guess so,” Keith said uncertainly. “Never been a counselor before, if that’s what you mean.”

“Oh, boy… Well, it’s a trip, I can tell you that much. Wait, hold this for me.” Hunk didn’t wait for an answer, thrusting the wet mop into Keith’s hands and spinning around to check on a tall pot of unidentifiable broth. He fished a ladle out of the pocket of his apron and stirred the steaming pot, mumbling to himself. “Shit, where’d the cayenne go? I just put it right here.”

“Coran told me you were the swimming instructor, right?” Keith said, looking at the mop in his hands. “Are you getting paid to do grunt work?”

“Kinda,” Hunk told him, rifling through several of the cupboards above his head. “I mostly do it because I like it, and this place is like Allura’s baby, so if it makes her happy, then I don’t mind. Besides, their chef sucks, and she needs all the help she can get.”

“Screw you and your culinary arts degree!” a voice echoed across the kitchen.

“Sorry, Shay, but your food is garbage and everyone knows it,” Hunk called back affectionately. “Even though she’s in charge of the kitchens here, cooking isn’t really Shay’s thing -- she’s more into gardening, and oh, _man_ , she is good at it. It’s crazy. You see all that fancy landscaping outside Allura’s office? All those flowers and shit? And the perfect rows of tulips bordering the archery range? That’s all Shay. She planted each one and organized them all by color or something, I think. Pretty wild, right?” Hunk’s eyes crinkled at the corners.

“Yeah, wild,” Keith said. He guiltily recalled stomping on young flowers as he dashed into Allura's office that morning. “Does Shay know you’re so, uh, passionate? About her work?”

Hunk shook his head with conviction, still digging in the cupboard. “Nah, can’t let that stuff go to her head. You know how it is. Gotta keep each other humble around here. _Ah!_ Cayenne! Got you, motherfucker.”

“Have you been working here for a long time?” Keith asked awkwardly, peering around for Coran. The red mustache had disappeared into the fray, and Keith wasn’t very good at small talk.

Hunk swiped the mop from Keith’s hands and messily smeared it over the tile. “This is my third summer, yeah. My big sister has been coming here as a camper since she was a kid, way back when Allura’s old man owned it, so I thought I’d kinda carry on the tradition after she grew out of it. It's a family thing.”

Keith fiddled with a butter knife. “Right. Makes sense.”

“…But that’s super boring and you don’t care about my life story,” Hunk said with a good-natured smile. He pointed his ladle over the top of the island to where Coran was munching pieces of sliced cucumber off an unattended cutting board. “Listen, if you don’t get out of here and take Coran with you, Shay’s going to have a tantrum.”

“Hunk, I’m about _this_ close to reporting you to Allura for insubordination,” Shay hollered.

Brandishing his mop, he retorted, “I don’t even officially work under you!”

They were both grinning at each other as they bickered. Keith felt like there was some kind of secondary conversation happening here that he didn’t quite understand, and he not-so-gracefully extricated himself by simply turning around and walking toward the swinging doors.

“How do I get to the lake?” he asked Hunk over his shoulder.

“Oh, uh -- head straight out of the dining hall and hang a left,” Hunk told him. “You’ll see a sign once you reach the woods.” He rapped his knuckles on the counter to get Coran’s attention and pointed after Keith.

On the front steps, Keith stopped short and stared at the wash of colorful flowers freshly planted at his feet. The mulch smelled dark and earthy, and he kind of liked it. He nudged a purple blossom with the toe of his shoe; it swayed happily in response.

“There you are!” Coran clapped him on the shoulder with one hand, picking bits of cucumber rind out of his teeth with the other. “Can’t get rid of me that easily, sorry to say. Come on, then!”

Weaving through the trees, Keith shuffled his feet in the thick blanket of pine needles that covered the ground just to hear the gentle, whispery noise it made. Coran babbled about the history of the valley -- how the parcel of land came into Allura’s family because her great-grandfather traded it for a couple of cows and a half-bottle of whiskey, or so the legend goes -- while Keith half-listened. Eventually the tree line broke and opened out onto the sandy shore of the lake; it was huge, shielded entirely by mountains, protected from the outside world like a kind of clandestine paradise. Frogs belched quietly among the reeds. The sunlight fragmented into a thousand glittering pieces on the surface of the water.

“Lake Arus,” Coran said with a note of pride in his voice, as if he were personally responsible for the magnificent view. “The gem of the valley.”

Further down the shoreline, a long, wide pier floated over the water. It was lined with small battered sailboats bobbing in sync, their sails tightly wrapped, and a cluster of people that looked like they were skipping rocks.

Coran hopped up onto the pier, and it wobbled under his sudden weight. “Ahoy, sailors! Hard at work, are we?”

One of them glanced back at Coran and elbowed his friends; they all straightened up and dropped the rocks in their hands into the water with a conspicuous _plop-plop-plop_ sound.

“We finished spraying down the skiffs and prepping them for tomorrow,” the first one said. He had a toothy grin and bright blue eyes.

“And the canoes? Have you cleaned and waxed them as well?” Coran asked, arms crossed.

“Uh…” He hesitated, looking slightly sheepish. “No?”

The cluster dissipated, several of them wandering away to return to work, but Coran pushed Keith forward.

“ _This_ young troublemaker is our sailing instructor -- and the head of the blue cabin,” he explained. “Keith, Lance. Lance, Keith.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lance said, “the new guy.”

Keith shrugged. “That’s me.”

“You ever sailed before?” Lance asked.

“Nope.” Keith had been canoeing on a river once when he was a kid, as part of an outreach program for "troubled" children. The canoe tipped and he split his head open on a rock at the bottom. He still had a jagged line of scar tissue on his scalp. Ever since then, his general stance toward anything related to boating was _fuck that._

“Well, I’m pretty good at it,” Lance said nonchalantly. “I’ve been the instructor here for a few years, and I’ve won a couple sloop races back home. I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

“No, thanks, I’m good,” Keith said, frowning slightly. “I don’t actually have any interest in sailing. At all.”

Lance raised his eyebrows, then guffawed, a sharp, bright sound. “Sorry, bud, you don’t have a choice. Wait, wait -- Allura didn’t tell you? All cabin counselors have to participate in lessons with their campers, so you’re learning to sail whether you like it or not, my dude.”

Keith looked back at Coran for confirmation, and felt a heavy fist of dread when he nodded. “ _Everything?_ All the lessons?” Keith asked.

“Oh, yes,” Coran said. “Camp Altea is as much a learning experience for its campers as it is for its counselors. Archery, horseback riding, wilderness skills, swimming… It’s very educational. Last summer, Hunk even taught me how to make friendship bracelets.” He held up a wrist, adorned with multicolored, braided string.

_Well, shit._

Keith had been under the impression he’d be getting paid to mostly sit in the sun and keep a handful of dumb kids from eating poisonous berries or whatever. He didn’t realize he’d actually have to _participate_.

“Surprise,” Lance said, chortling like he’d just heard his favorite joke. “I guess I’ll be seeing you on the lake tomorrow, huh?”

Keith scowled. Part of him considered tossing his “employee handbook” off the pier, climbing back in his car and driving the four hours back to the city. He’d never gone to summer camp as a kid -- for as long as he could remember, he’d either been in remedial school or he’d worked a shitty minimum-wage job. He had exactly zero experience with any of this stuff; he was nineteen years old and could barely swim. His mastery of team sports was limited to playing basketball at public courts with hard-eyed older boys who towered over him and shoved him down into the asphalt. Hell, he’d never even _seen_ a horse in real life.

God help them all if they expected him to sing campfire songs.

He didn’t mind eating crappy food or sleeping outside (he was intimately familiar with the discomfort of roughing it), but being laughed at for his utter lack of knowledge was a sour prospect. Keith had spent so much of his life just trying to scrape by and survive, he’d missed out entirely on all the warm, glowing childhood memories that most people had. He’d taught himself how to ride a bike doing shaky figure-eights in a dark parking lot when he was nine.

 _I missed my high school graduation because my foster father called the cops on me_ wasn’t exactly the kind of fond remembrance Keith could share with others. If he did, they looked at him differently. He could pinpoint the sea change every time: their gaze would turn from curious to horrified to a kind of gross, cloying pity. Or maybe fear. He didn’t know which was worse; they all made him feel like he was broken or dysfunctional somehow.

He stared at Lance, who was looking back at him with a cocky grin, tipping his chin down to return Keith’s gaze. With sudden, sharp clarity, Keith remembered the older boys on the courts who elbowed him in the face when he went to sink a basket and snickered to each other as Keith picked grit out of his scraped knees.

He was on a team all his own, but he kept playing.

_Fuck it._

Besides, his car would probably disintegrate into a hundred sad, rusty pieces if he tried to take it on the highway again.

“Yeah,” Keith said, crossing his arms. “I’ll be here.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keith needs to lighten the fuck up. He is _super_ depressing at the start of this AU. Get this boy a goddamn hug.
> 
> Minor warning for very brief racist/homophobic language at the end of the chapter.

Sprawled on the front stoop of the dining hall with a bucket of peeled fruit at his side, Hunk whistled at the back of Keith’s head. “Hungry?” he asked, holding up an apple.

With a grunt, Keith set down the heavy ladder and box of tools that he’d been hefting then held out a hand, nodding in thanks after Hunk underhanded it to him.

The apple was vividly red, and its juice dripped on his shirt when he broke the skin with his teeth, tart and sweet. It was incredible.

“Wow,” Keith murmured, awestruck, mouth half-full. He sort of hadn’t realized he said it aloud until Hunk laughed at him.

“You must be a city kid, huh?” he asked, resting his elbows on his knees and letting his feet hang off the bottom step. “I think everyone has that reaction when they first eat food that hasn’t been sitting on a supermarket shelf for a few weeks.”

Keith wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “I moved around a little,” he said with a shrug, then took another bite. He was used to apples with waxy skin and mealy flesh; he didn’t even know apples could taste so… _apple-y._

“There’s a big orchard a few miles down the road that gives us all these crates of fruit every summer ‘cause Allura lets their kids come to camp for free.” Hunk dug a second apple out of his bulging pocket and began peeling it, throwing the skin into the dirt. “Careful, though. These things will fuck you up -- you’ll never be able to eat another apple again for the rest of your life without thinking _yeah, but these ones were better._ Trust me. I know of what I speak.”

“I believe you,” Keith said earnestly, because he was already pretty sure this particular apple had left an indelible mark on his soul. He licked the sticky juice from between his fingers, savoring it.

“So you from New York or what?” Hunk asked, dropping the denuded apple into the bucket and picking up another.

“Everywhere,” Keith told him.

“A roamer. I get that.” He nodded. “Well, I mean, theoretically, I get it. My family stayed in one place; I grew up outside Honolulu, and I probably would’ve stayed there if I hadn’t gotten accepted to school in New York.”

“Never been to Hawai’i,” Keith said. He was nibbling the core of his apple, not letting a single bite go to waste. “What’s it like?”

Hunk grinned down at his feet, sighing with nostalgia. “Beautiful. Every sunrise makes you glad to be alive, man. No, for real -- it sounds so hokey, but it’s true. Coming to the city made me realize how _different_ it is back home.”

“You gonna go back after you finish school?” Keith asked. He never liked these kinds of superficial conversations with strangers, but he was actually kind of curious. He tried to imagine what a sunrise in Hawai’i must look like.

“Eventually, yeah,” Hunk said, flicking a chunk of apple skin off his leg. “I already finished, actually -- graduated this year -- but I dunno… I thought I might hang around for a little bit. There are some things about New York that I like.”

Shay stuck her head around the door of the dining hall, propping it open. Her heavy hoop earrings glinted in the sunlight. “Done with those apples yet?”

“Just about,” Hunk said, leaning back on his elbows to look at her. “Got anything else for me?”

“About four hundred potatoes that need peeling and dicing before they go in the freezer,” she said.

Hunk groaned.

“Don’t worry, you big baby, I’ll help you,” she told him. “I need to sit down for a few minutes anyway before my legs give out. Ugh, it’s barely noon and I’m ready to sleep for a week. I can’t believe we do this _every_ summer.”

Still munching determinedly on his apple core, Keith slung an arm around the ladder and hoisted it onto his shoulder. “I should get going,” he mumbled around a mouthful of apple. “Staff cabins are…?”

Shay pointed over Hunk’s shoulder. “Up that way, just across the field. Allura’s got you on maintenance duty, I’m guessing?”

“Coran, actually,” Keith said, spitting out a seed. “I made the mistake of telling him I was marginally competent at repairing things, so he gave me a ladder, a drill, and a long list of shit to un-break.”

“Hey,” Hunk said. “Here. One for the road.” He tossed Keith another apple.

Crossing the field, Keith saw a knot of people at its far end, talking and laughing, all clustered in a half-circle around someone pounding a pair of goalposts into the soil while another person stood aside with an armful of netting. They must have told a joke, because the herd suddenly erupted in laughter.

Everyone here seemed to know each other already, and Keith was the odd one out. He watched out of the corner of his eye as he walked, wondering what was funny.

Chalky white stripes painted on the grass marked mid- and outer field, and the sidelines were littered with gigantic plastic tubs filled with soccer balls, softballs, baseball bats, frisbees… even a couple of hula hoops were sticking out at crazy angles.

 _Never learned to hula hoop, either,_ Keith thought, blowing hair out of his eyes as he crossed the outfield line toward the little village of staff cabins. They faced the center of camp in a neat row, but the houses themselves were in pretty sore shape: front steps slightly askew, white paint flaking, roofs bowing. The windows were grimy and even cracked in some places.

He dragged a finger along one of the sagging windowsills, and his fingertip cleared a trail in the thick dirt that had accumulated there. Maybe sleeping out in the staff cabins _wasn’t_ such a luxury.

All of them could have used some love, but Coran had pointed him to one in particular that had a busted gutter. It had come unstuck from the side of the cabin and was leaking water through the roof every time it rained. It was a simple fix, but it meant he had to get up there to do it.

Shoulder aching, Keith dropped the heavy ladder and toolbox and circled around the cabin, making note of all the spots where the gutter was loose; finally, he pushed the ladder upright, digging its feet into the warm dirt, and started to climb with drill in hand. It made soft noises of protest as he balanced his feet on each rung, shedding splinters liberally.

 _Is there_ anything _around here that isn’t on the verge of falling apart?_ he wondered.

As he scooped wet handfuls of leaves out of the gutter, he peered more closely at the damage. Several of the screws had popped out of the old wood of the roof line and would need to be replaced; he started to pry them out, pocketing each rusted bit of metal, but some of them were twisted at weird angles that he couldn’t quite reach. He needed a different tactic.

With a sigh, he braced his palms on the edge of the roof and clambered up, the rough shingles scratching his skin.

When he straightened up, he stopped for a moment as he realized his vantage point afforded him a pretty good view of the campground. He spotted Allura’s office and saw her standing out front, trying to mend some of the flowers that he’d accidentally trampled that morning. He counted the colors of the cabins, noting with pride the vibrant red of his own. Through the thick of the trees, Lake Arus glittered. He could even see the purple outline of the _GO GALRA_ banner on the other side of the river.

Keith could still taste the lingering sweetness of the apple on the back of his tongue. Warm breeze lifted the hair off the back of his neck. Up here, it was almost kind of zen. He stared for a little while, just watching the movements of the camp, like a beekeeper observing the focused industry of a hive. A stranger on the outside, looking in.

The group of people on the field seemed like they’d finished setting up the goals -- the netting was strung up and stapled to the posts, and the tubs of equipment were sorted -- but a few hangers-on still lingered in that loose circle. At the center, like a point of gravitational pull, someone stood tall and square-shouldered, framed from behind by sunlight.

Keith squinted, shielding his eyes with one hand, but it was too bright to see much. Despite the distance, though, he heard the laugh: distinct, suffused with warmth, rolling outward like ripples in water.

The circle echoed the noise, laughing with him.

Keith rolled his eyes.

He knew the kind of dudes who had entourages like that. He’d met them enough times in the hallways of his high school, or in darkened corners at parties. They were the ones perched at the top of the social food chain, happy to step on the heads of those beneath. Instinctively, Keith knew to ignore and avoid them.

He turned away and dropped to one knee, fingers skating along the edge of the gutter, feeling for more loose spots. In full view of the sun, it was uncomfortably warm, and he had to struggle to yank some of the screws out of the old wood; it wasn’t long before he could feel sweat trickling down the small of his back.

_Shit. Should have brought water or something._

By the time he pried all the gutter screws loose and drilled new ones in their place, his arm was sore, his palms were scraped raw, and the collar of his dark t-shirt was completely damp. He wiped his face with his sleeve and exhaled heavily, rattling the aluminum gutter to check if it was secure. It didn’t budge.

The entire structural integrity of these cabins might be completely going to shit, but hey, at least the gutters were rock solid. Allowing himself to nurture a tiny spark of pride, small and hidden like an oyster’s pearl, he scrambled to his feet, pulled the apple out of his back pocket, and rewarded himself with a bite.

The four-hour drive to the mountains was worth it, he decided, for the apples alone. He’d sit through eight weeks of Boy Scout bullshit and friendship bracelets if it meant he could take a few of these home with him.

He stuck his apple in his mouth, holding it between his teeth, then picked up his drill and lowered himself onto the ladder. It swayed slightly as he put his weight on it but didn’t immediately topple, so he shrugged and hopped down a rung.

“Hey!” someone called from behind him, voice echoing off the trees. “You! With the mullet! C’mere!”

Keith twisted around sharply to look, his eyebrows drawn in a scowl, and the ladder jerked and groaned. He felt it the instant before it happened: his weight shifted an inch too far, the ladder pulled away from the cabin wall, and suddenly he was tipping backwards, falling twenty feet to the ground. It felt as though he was watching it happen in slow motion.

_No no no fuckfuckfuckfuck--_

_“Oof!”_

He expected to hit the ground on his back, maybe bust a few ribs or snap his neck if he was extraordinarily unlucky, and any second now the ladder would land directly on his face and break his nose. Instead, he felt the impact hit him sideways, knocking the wind out of his lungs. He went tumbling across the dirt, arms curled around himself, struggling for air. His blood was rushing loud, adrenaline buzzing, and his eyes were screwed shut.

Dizzily, his scrambled brain remarked upon how warm the ground was. And soft. _Wow,_ really soft. It smelled like sunblock and sweat, too. Maybe a little bit like deodorant.

“Your elbows,” someone gasped in his ear, “are extremely sharp.”

Keith started violently. _What in the fuck._

“Holy shit,” Lance said, skidding to a stop in front of Keith, “are you guys all right? Jesus Christ, I’m sorry -- I didn’t mean to scare you like that. You are a _jumpy_ motherfucker.”

Keith coughed. He blinked a few times, slow. One, two, three. Looked down. Beneath him, sprawled in the dirt with arms haloing Keith -- circling but not touching, as though he were caging a wild animal -- was a stranger. He was wearing a pained smile, a pale pink scar across the bridge of his nose, and several dead leaves tangled in his hair, close-cropped and entirely black save for a sweep of white over his forehead.

“Hi,” he said simply, as though this were a normal, everyday occurrence for him. His eyes raked over Keith’s face, checking for injuries. He was a little short of breath. “You okay?”

“I -- you -- uh, I’m… fine?” Keith mumbled, uncertain and disoriented. He shoved himself upright and the stranger grunted.

“Seriously,” he said, wincing, “those _elbows_.”

“How did you…? I was up there -- and then you were…” Keith waved his hand, pointing vaguely up at the roof and then at the swirl of overturned dirt where they’d both hit the ground. The ladder splintered itself into multiple pieces in the fall, and Keith’s half-eaten apple had rolled to a stop several yards away, coated entirely in grime. The electric drill was busted, its bit bent at a violent angle.

“He caught you,” Lance said, awe evident in his voice. “Tackled your ass straight out of the air like a sack of potatoes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone run so fast.”

_Oh._

“Oh,” Keith said. “That’s…” He paused awkwardly, feeling mortification sink in. He could still smell the artificially sweet scent of that sunblock, and he hated that stupid shock of pale hair.“I owe you one.”

Lance spluttered in indignation. “What? Dude! He just saved your _life!_ That’s worth more than one!”

“Relax, Lance,” the stranger said, struggling to sit up, prodding gingerly at his own ribs. “He doesn’t owe me anything. You sure you’re okay? You didn’t hit your head, did you?”

“No,” Keith replied right away, “I’m fine. You aren’t, though.”

There was a long stripe of abraded flesh on the outside of his thick forearm, sticky with mud and fresh blood. He sucked in air through his teeth as he lifted his left arm to inspect the wound, muscles cording beneath sun-darkened skin.

“Oh, gross,” Lance said with noticeable delight, offering a hand up to both of them. “Lemme see that.”

Keith got to his feet as best he could without Lance’s help, still a little unsteady. He twitched his fingers and toes, making sure everything still worked; his left side ached with a slow throb, and his lungs felt wrung out. Though adrenaline was still burning hard in his veins, his brain was foggy, trying to make sense of what just happened.

Roof, ladder, falling, ground. Sunblock that smelled a little like bananas and a little like chemicals. _Hi._ Warm skin, white hair. _You okay?_

He glanced down at his elbows. Not that he’d ever thought about it before, but maybe they were kind of sharp.

“We should get you to the infirmary before you get some kind of flesh-eating infection,” Lance said, hauling the stranger up and staggering under his weight. “Can you walk, big guy?”

“I’m good,” he said, but his voice was clipped and his gait was uneven.

“You totally aren’t good, you fucking liar,” Lance said. “Whatever, just lean on me. Screw your manly dignity.”

“When have you _ever_ known me to give a damn about something like manly dignity?” he asked, but slung an arm around Lance’s shoulders anyway. The gesture was easy, casual, familiar, and Lance tucked one hand under his armpit to hold him steady.

Keith hung back. The feeling of being the odd one out surfaced again, burning in his throat like bile, surprising him with its sudden intensity. He was _used_ to this shit, so why was he getting sore about it now?

“Keith, man, you should go, too,” Lance urged him. “I mean, you _did_ hit the dirt pretty hard, life-saving tackle or not.”

“I’m okay,” he said again, shaking his head, though he could already tell his ribs would be bruised by tomorrow.

“Come on.” The stranger turned around, wobbling a little in Lance’s hold, and stretched out a hand like a peace offering. “I’ll feel a lot better if you get a once-over from our nurse.”

Lance pulled him along. “Bro, you’re bleeding all over me.”

“Just -- humor me, okay?” he said as Lance dragged him, still extending his hand to Keith like he honestly expected him to take it. His gaze was achingly, uncomfortably earnest.

“Really, I’m fine,” Keith mumbled, yet still he fell into step a few feet behind them, pointedly ignoring the offered hand. Other than the continuous throb dancing up and down the left side of his torso, he _was_ mostly fine -- it was the other guy who’d taken the brunt of the impact, judging by his limp and the half-congealed blood trickling down his arm in dark rivulets.

At the door to the infirmary, Lance paused. “Listen,” he said slowly, “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know -- I mean, I just wanted to get your attention, I didn’t think you’d --”

“Don’t worry about it,” Keith said, though it came out a little more terse than he had perhaps intended. “Honestly.” It really wasn’t Lance’s fault.

“Thanks for the ride, Lance,” the stranger said, squeezing Lance’s shoulder and hobbling up the infirmary steps. “Wanna do me a favor and go tell Allura she’s gonna need a new ladder?”

“Fine,” Lance said. “I’ll just leave out the part where you almost fucking _died._ ”

“Hardly.” The stranger huffed a laugh, leaning against the door and glancing over his shoulder at Keith. “You weigh, what, like, a buck thirty soaking wet? It’ll take a little more than that to kill me.”

“I compensate for my size with my razor-sharp elbows,” Keith said dryly, coming up the steps behind him. After nineteen years of it, jabs at his height didn’t get his hackles up anymore. Plus, Keith was lucid enough to know that starting shit with someone twice his size on the first day of a new job was maybe, _maybe_ a bad idea. And this was the kind of guy who had friends to back him up.

“Like the poison spurs on a platypus,” the stranger said, grin widening. “It looks real cute ‘til it kills you.” He pushed the door open and beckoned for Keith to go first, like a gentleman escorting his date.

“Wait, the… what? Those things are poisonous?”

“Apparently. That’s what Pidge told me. I didn’t believe it, either, but she printed out a twelve-page Wikipedia article about platypuses and put me in a headlock until I read the whole thing.”

Keith squinted. “Pidge? She’s even smaller than I am.”

“Yeah, but she knows all my weaknesses.”

The infirmary was clean and quiet, a decent-sized one-room cabin with a couple of overstuffed chairs, a line of cots against the far wall, and a cracked ceramic sink. The room was split by an adjustable floor-length curtain, giving some measure of privacy.

Raking pale bangs off his forehead, the stranger leaned his head around the curtain. “Nyma?” he called. “You around?”

No answer.

“I bet I know where she is,” he sighed, then picked up a battered white phone on a desk tucked into the corner. He dialed a few numbers and balanced the phone on his shoulder, waiting as it rang. “Rolo? Hey. Is Nyma there with you?” There was a pause, and then he rolled his eyes and mouthed _I knew it_ at Keith. “Will you tell her to come by her office? I’ve got someone here who took a pretty nasty fall, and I -- no, no, he’s fine, or I _think_ he’s fine… Well, I caught him, sort of. Yeah, I’m okay.”

“He’s bleeding,” Keith said loudly.

The stranger gave him a look. “I’m _fine,_ ” he echoed. “I can take care of myself. Just tell Nyma -- wait, his name? Uh, I don’t know, actually.” He pulled the phone away from his mouth and glanced over.

“It’s Keith.”

The stranger arched one dark eyebrow. “Of course. No wonder I didn’t recognize you. You --”

“Yeah, yeah,” Keith said with a grimace. “I’m the new guy. I know.”

“I was going to say you were _late,_ so I didn’t see you this morning,” he finished, his gaze a little bit amused and a little bit knowing. He turned back to the phone. “Let Nyma know we need her, will you?”

Dropping the handset in its cradle, he rummaged through a cabinet above the desk and pulled out a small white bottle that rattled when he tossed it to Keith.

“Ibuprofen,” he said. “I have a feeling you’ll need some. If you’re not hurting yet, you will be in a few hours.”

Keith tapped three of the little beige pills into his palm and was about to swallow them dry when the stranger interrupted him.

“No way,” he chided. “You were elbow-deep in gutter-muck not that long ago. Go wash your hands.”

_You have got to be fucking kidding me._

Keith’s eyes narrowed. His first reaction to being ordered around like a child was to hurl the pill bottle in the dude’s face and flip him double birds as he waltzed the fuck out of here. Overkill, maybe, but Keith wasn’t one for subtlety.

They stared at each other for a second.

_First day. New job. Paycheck. Be cool._

“Yes, sir,” Keith said, flippant, toeing that careful line between sarcasm and outright disrespect. He shoved the bottle in his front pocket, where it knocked against something -- the bent, rusty screws he’d pried out of the gutter. Probably lucky he hadn’t gotten stabbed by one when he fell.

The pipes made an ominous clanging noise when Keith turned the sink faucet on and the water sputtered, but it was clear and cold and it felt good on his scraped palms. He scrubbed at the dirt on his knuckles and bowed his head over the basin so he could splash cool water on his face, then lingered for a moment; he still felt wrung out but slightly improved now that he was at least clean.

“So, since we haven’t officially met yet,” the stranger said, still limping slightly as he nudged in beside him at the lip of the sink, “my name is Shiro.”

Keith shrank away, water dripping off his chin. What was this guy’s _deal?_ “Yeah, well. Thanks for the daring rescue.”

Shiro twisted the faucet until the tap ran hot and bent his bloody forearm under the spray, making a face as he rinsed away the worst of it. Clumps of dirt and reddish water circled the drain. He picked up a chunk of lumpy soap and, sucking in air with a resigned frown, lathered up his raw, shredded skin. His lips were pressed into a tight line of displeasure. It had to hurt.

“Don’t hold your breath,” Keith said, unprompted, then clapped his mouth shut. _Where did that come from?_

“What?” The furrow between Shiro’s brows deepened.

“It’s just --” Keith dug his toe into a groove in the old floorboards, studying the scuffs on his sneakers and scowling. He felt foolish but he didn’t know why, and it annoyed him. “You gotta breathe through the pain. It hurts more if you hold it in.”

“Yeah, I know,” Shiro sighed, scrubbing now at the blood on his palms. “Just a bad habit I can’t quite break.”

Keith snorted, digging in his pocket for the bottle of painkillers. “Everyone has those.”

“I’ve probably got a lot more than most,” Shiro said, and his smile was a little lopsided, tight around the edges. He looked up at Keith. “What about you?”

“What about me?” Keith popped open the ibuprofen and dropped the pills on his tongue, tipping his head back to swallow them. They tasted like chalk and sugar on the way down.

“Tell me one of yours,” Shiro said. “Your bad habits. You already know one of mine. Seems only fair, right?”

Keith frowned, peeling the label off the pill bottle in papery strips. It had been an offhand remark, something to fill the silence, not an invitation for further conversation. “Why?”

“I’m curious about you.” Shiro cupped his palms under the water and rinsed off his arm one last time, frothy suds running over his broad wrist. “You don’t talk much, but I know you aren’t shy. You just don’t want to tell me anything.”

“You don’t know that.” Irritation sparked hot and sudden in Keith’s chest, and his eyebrows hiked up his forehead. Fuck this guy and his douchebag haircut, trying to act like he had the slightest idea about -- about  _anything._ “You didn’t even know my name until five minutes ago.”

Shiro raised both his hands, palms up, in a gesture of peace. Water droplets spattered on the floor. His voice dropped to a calming rumble. “Hey, hey, relax. You’re right; I’m sorry. It was just a feeling I had.”

With the dirt and grime rinsed away, Keith abruptly realized that the scar on Shiro’s face was not his only one: his right arm was disfigured by a massive, uneven line of scar tissue that snaked from the papery skin of his inner wrist to the crook of his elbow. It was stark and brutal against his golden skin, and the sight of it was arresting, almost disquieting. The scar was long healed, smooth and silvery, and dotted with even rows of puckered pockmarks where the wound had been stitched or stapled shut.

Shiro dropped his arms to his sides, and Keith dragged his surprised stare away from the stretch of ruined skin.

They looked at each other without speaking. Keith knew Shiro was waiting for him to say something -- he recognized the challenge in the determined set of Shiro’s square jaw. _Go ahead_ , his gritted teeth seemed to say. _Ask. I dare you._ It was the look of someone who was accustomed to people feeling they were entitled to the gory details of his tragedies. He was waiting for that sickening, simpering pity.

Keith knew all this because he’d lived it a thousand times already.

 _An orphan,_ people would purr sympathetically. _How terrible. Tell me more. Crack your ribs open and entertain me with the softest, saddest parts of yourself._

A few beats passed.

“I, uh -- I always put too much milk in my cereal,” Keith murmured in the silence. “That's it. That's my habit. Ever since I was a kid. No matter what I do, I can’t shake it. I feel guilty about it every time, too, like -- _man, some poor cow suffered for all that milk I'm wasting._ But I still do it.”

Shiro’s smile was slow, surprised. It started as a quirk of the lips and blossomed like a flower opening its petals to the sun, unfurling in a lambent glow. He laughed and Keith recognized the sound: he’d heard it earlier rippling across the field.

Keith instantly understood why people clustered around Shiro. He understood why these kinds of people always had an entourage built on a cult of personality -- and he understood exactly how opposite he and Shiro were. He understood how dangerous it was to return Shiro’s easy smile, because guys like Shiro were the ones at the top, used to giving orders, propped up by their bloated ego. You were in their good graces as long as you were useful to them somehow. Guys like him pushed the scrawny kids in lockers and slept with your girlfriend and sold you out and pressed their knee to your throat while they called you a _faggot chink_ as your head rocked against the cold cement. Keith knew enough not to trust Shiro’s soft edges, or the warmth in his dark eyes.

But he smiled back anyway.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is long because this whole thing is basically a self-indulgent mess and I love writing thousands of words about Team Voltron just goofing off with each other.
> 
> God fucking bless every single one of you assholes who've cheered me on while writing this AU. I love you. Kiss me.
> 
> I'm particularly grateful to [Kuill](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kuill) for her insight and stellar advice, and [Kero](https://twitter.com/keroikawa) for her infectious enthusiasm and fantastic hair.

Keith was so tired. He thought maybe he had never been so tired in his life. His ribs hurt and he had blisters on the bottom of his feet and the back of his neck was definitely sunburnt and it was a monumental effort to even stay standing upright because he wanted to melt into a boneless, sweaty puddle and sleep until human civilization wiped itself out and the very concept of “summer camp” was lost to the ruins of time.

Instead, he was helping Pidge carry several plastic bins full of art supplies out to the dining hall. “Helping” was sort of a generous word for it -- she’d more or less dragged him to the rec center, loaded his arms with bins, and told him to march. Keith was too exhausted to even put up a fight.

Earlier that afternoon he’d spent an hour or so lingering in the infirmary while the nurse, Nyma, looked him over. She was cute, and while being touched often made him tense, he’d almost liked the careful way her fingertips skated over his skin when she was checking for internal injuries. She gave both him and Shiro the all-clear and ushered them out of her office, admonishing them to be more careful in the future.

Of course, the instant he was officially declared healthy, Keith was put to work carrying heavy stuff back and forth across the entire goddamn campground.

Hunk, Shiro, and Allura were in front of the dining hall, relocating a few of the long tables and chairs to the grassy lawn. Allura beckoned to Keith, pointing him toward the end of one of the tables where he could lay down his burden.

“What’s all this for?” Keith asked, setting down the pile of bins and propping his elbows atop them. He took a minute to catch his breath. It was barely past six in the evening and the sun wouldn’t even set for another three hours, but he was almost salivating at the thought of crawling into his shitty bunk in his shitty cabin and passing out.

“Tradition,” Shiro grunted as he and Hunk hoisted another table into place. He brushed his palms off on his black jeans and grinned at Keith. “We always have a cookout on the first night before the campers get here. Burgers, hot dogs, the whole thing.”

“And veggie dogs,” Allura said, holding up a finger. Her hair had started to slip out of its bun, long white wisps falling around her face.

Looking down at the box of art supplies he was leaning on, Keith asked, “You need glitter and fingerpaint for a cookout?”

“I mean,” Hunk said, “you could season your burger with some rainbow glitter if you wanted to make your trips to the outhouse a little more fabulous.”

Pidge snorted. “We get to paint signs for our cabins,” she told him. “You know, like, _welcome to the Green Cabin, run by benevolent dictator Pidge._ You can write whatever you want.”

“Bonus points if you insult the other cabins,” Hunk said, “and triple points if you make fun of Lance’s giant ears.”

Keith raised an eyebrow. “Who’s keeping score?”

“I am,” Pidge said with authority, tugging one of the bins of art supplies across the table and lifting the lid to scavenge its contents. “And you’ve all lost already. Green Cabin sweeps the competition with a solid 10.0 across the board. See you next summer, losers.”

Shiro shook his head, reaching out to flick the brim of Pidge’s straw hat with playful disapproval. “Don’t listen to them, Keith. There’s no score, and Lance’s ears aren’t even _that_ big.”

“Dude, those things are so huge, Lance is on the verge of becoming airborne every time he nods his head,” Hunk said. “You could probably stick him on your roof and get fifty channels of cable.”

Allura cleared her throat, arms crossed, and Hunk whistled innocently.

“We refer to our counselors as Team Altea because you _are_ a team,” she told Keith, though she shot a pointed look at Hunk. “This camp is made up of dozens of individual moving parts that all come together to form a cohesive whole, and in order for that to go smoothly, you need to work together, communicate, and trust each other. So we have a few team-building exercises that we like to do every year to help you build those connections.”

Keith swallowed a nearly audible groan. _Team-building._ “What sort of exercises?”

She gestured to Pidge, who had already cracked open a tube of green paint and was messily drawing a dragon. “Well, everyone paints a sign for their cabin to establish a sense of individual identity within the team, and then we eat together on the first night to foster community --”

“You make it sound so clinical,” Hunk interrupted her laughingly. “What she _means_ is that we pretty much just sit around and cherish these last few precious hours of peace and quiet before the campers arrive.”

“And then we all get to sleep outside,” Pidge said. “That’s the best part.”

Keith cocked his head in apprehension. “Outside like kinda-outside-but-actually-in-our-cabins? Or… _outside_ outside? On the ground?”

“The real deal,” she told him with a giddy smile.

Shiro hummed thoughtfully from behind her. “I don’t know -- you fell pretty hard this morning. If you’re in pain, we can stick you in one of the cabins, let you sleep on a real mattress.”

Keith deliberated, weighing his options. He could admit the truth, say he was hurting, and skip out on some feel-good team bonding shit that he didn’t really want to be a part of -- except then he’d look like a pussy, crying for special privileges that he didn’t deserve, which was a surefire way to make people resent you. Or he could suck it up, avoid rocking the boat, and sleep outside with everyone else, but that meant he actually had to _do_ it.

He hesitated a second too long, and Shiro looked up, eyes trained on him with that incisive, earnest gaze that reminded Keith of every clueless social worker that had ever tried to help him.

“It’s no big deal. I’ll be fine,” Keith blurted, almost defensive. The words were out of his mouth before he’d even really made the decision. “You’re the one with the gaping wound on your arm. I mean, the -- the scrape on your left arm -- not the, uh. Other one.”

_Jesus Christ, Keith._

Shiro’s face was blank for a moment, then he gave Keith a smile that was too jovial to be convincing. “I know what you meant.”

Keith’s guts twisted.

When you’re weird or different or flawed, it becomes your second heartbeat; it’s part of you, inexorable. Eventually, it fades to background noise, and you forget about it -- until the moment it comes to the forefront in aching clarity and you realize that even if _you_ hardly notice it anymore, it’s the only thing anyone else ever actually sees about you.

He hated himself for being the one to do that to Shiro, because he knew exactly how it felt. He thought maybe he should apologize, but he didn’t know how, so he burned with his fists shoved in his pockets and said absolutely nothing.

“Shiro, sit next to me,” Pidge demanded, reaching for his wrist and leaving five little finger-shaped smudges of green paint on his skin. Her dragon was now burping a cloud of fire.

Shiro fell into the seat beside her, dug a piece of paper out of the pile and a black marker from one of the bins, then tipped his chin at Hunk and Keith. “You guys better get started if you wanna catch up to Pidge. And where’s Lance?”

“Oh, he finished his already,” Hunk said, inspecting various shades of yellow crayons with a critical eye. “He taped together, like, six pieces of cardboard and drew his own face on it.”

Keith was at a loss. He had a red Sharpie and a blank sheet of paper and no idea what the hell he was supposed to do with it. What was the point of this exercise? The cabins were already color-coded; they didn’t really _need_ signs to differentiate them. Shrugging, he scrawled _RED CABIN_ as neatly as he could, then capped his marker and sat back.

“That’s the most depressing shit I’ve ever seen,” Hunk said, staring at Keith’s paper. “Jesus. At least put some glitter on it. Just… something. Anything.”

Raising a haughty brow, Keith added a little smiley face in the upper right corner of the sign.

“That actually made it _worse_ somehow.” Hunk shook his head sadly.

Shiro was bent over the table, sketching a proud black lion sitting back on its mighty haunches and keeping vigil over four multi-colored cubs. It wasn’t the most realistic lion Keith had ever seen, but it was recognizable.

 _Is that supposed to be me?_ Keith wondered, looking at the red cub. It was small, but its teeth were bared in a ferocious snarl.

“My cabin sign,” Pidge announced, scribbling bloodstains on her dragon’s slavering jaws, “is going to kick your cabin sign’s ass.”

Shiro gave her a glare of paternal reproach. “Watch your language.”

Pidge stuck her tongue out at him, and he narrowed his eyes.

“Do that again and see what happens,” he threatened, but his voice was fond, and a smile -- a real one this time -- perked at the corners of his mouth. “I dare you.”

She considered this, then crossed her eyes and blew a wet, loud raspberry. Shiro’s hand darted forward and grabbed the tip of her tongue, and she yelped an open-mouthed laugh, batting at him.

“I warned you,” he snickered, dodging her slaps. “If I catch you swearing again, you won’t get it back next time.” He let her go, wiping his fingers on his shirt.

“Gross!” she howled. “I don’t know where that hand has been!”

“And I’ll never tell you.”

“I’m not a little kid anymore, y’know,” Pidge groused, but she leaned her head on Shiro’s shoulder anyway as she glued sequins around the edge of her paper.

“I’m just gonna… I’ll be back in a second,” Keith said quietly. His chest hurt, sharp and acute, and he didn’t know why. He took a step back, then turned around and left; he didn’t bother to think of an explanation, and nobody asked where he was going.

Walking away from the field at a fast clip despite his aching feet, he spotted the crooked square of lacquered wood nailed to a tree trunk that pointed him toward the lake path and followed it. The dirt path turned to softer sand right as it opened out onto the shore of the lake, and Keith exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

The pier was deserted. The hottest part of the day had already passed, and a soft breeze curled over the water. Something was buzzing or chirping in the trees, maybe cicadas, but he didn’t know what it was. Pidge probably knew. He could ask her. (He wouldn’t.)

Keith stared at his shoes, studying the imprints he left with each step, then crouched at the edge of the lake where the water lapped so gently against the shore. The sand was cool and wet and he buried his fingers in it, raking messy divots that slowly filled with lake water.

Fraction by fraction, he relaxed. Quiet, alone. His chin rested atop his kneecaps, and he considered letting himself fall asleep right there in the shade of the overhanging trees listening to the sigh of the lake’s slow tide.

“Whenever I lose a camper,” Shiro said, voice rolling low and calm, “this is the first place I look. Everyone seems to gravitate toward the lake.”

Keith pulled his hands back but stayed crouching, watching him approach. How had he not heard Shiro coming closer? Had he seen Keith playing in the sand like a child? The thought made him prickle with irritated embarrassment.

Shiro stopped short several yards away. His arms were crossed loosely over his chest, scar tucked out of sight, and Keith saw the abrasion on his forearm was already scabbing over. Still looked like it hurt, though.

“You doing okay?” Shiro asked. His voice kept its quiet, measured quality, like he was afraid Keith would spook and run.

“Uh-huh.” Keith brushed sand off his palms. He’d retreated out here to be by himself, and he was hoping his apathetic response would make it clear he wasn’t interested in friendly banter. He still felt ashamed for mentioning Shiro’s scar the way he did, but he didn’t want to think about it. He was tired and wrung out and awkward. Too many people, too much happening at once, and he couldn’t process it all fast enough.

Even if he wasn’t very good at it, Keith didn’t really mind speaking to people; most of the time, he almost liked it. _Relating_ to them, however, was something entirely different.

“Will you let me sit with you for a minute?”

Keith blinked. “You can do whatever you want,” he said simply, because what kind of question was that?

“I guess so,” Shiro said, “but I’m asking for your permission first.”

“Why?” Keith gaped for a second, then shook his head. The filter between his brain and his mouth sputtered and finally died. “I don’t -- _ugh._ Yes, all right? Permission granted. I don’t care, and you don’t have to ask. I’m too tired for whatever heart-to-heart shit you’re pulling with me right now. Just sit.”

Shiro laughed. It was such a warm sound and it made inexplicable anger spike in Keith’s belly. He yanked hard at a fraying thread on the hem of his jeans until it snapped.

Leaving plenty of space between their bodies, Shiro dropped to the ground next to Keith and kicked off his sneakers. He burrowed his bare feet in the sand, toes wiggling. Out of the corner of his eye, Keith saw a dark stain on the top of his left foot like a birthmark, or maybe another scar. He flicked his gaze away and watched a dragonfly buzzing over the water.

“When I first started here a couple of years ago, I didn’t know anyone except Pidge,” Shiro murmured. “It was sort of overwhelming.”

The wind carried the smell of charcoal and smoke, and Keith guessed the cookout had started. His stomach mumbled something unhappy; the last thing he’d had to eat was the apple Hunk gave him that morning.

“I was a different person before I got here, in a different place mentally, and doing this -- working here -- ended up being the best thing I ever did.” Shiro shrugged, stretching out his long legs in front of him with a rueful smile. “It seems ridiculous, right? That sleeping in a cabin and roasting marshmallows with some strangers’ kids could help me be a better man. But I’m being honest.”

Keith stared harder at the water. _What is this? Is this a pep talk? Is that what’s happening right now?_

“Look, you were right: I _don’t_ know you. I don’t know your story, I don’t know what’s bothering you, and I’m willing to bet money you’re not gonna tell me.” Shiro leaned forward, tilting his head until he was eye-level with Keith. “But I’m just asking you to give me a chance. You’re stuck here for eight weeks, and you heard what Allura said. In order for this mess to work, we all have to be a team, and we’ve gotta be willing to trust each other.”

 _Oh, god. It_ is _a pep talk._

“Without communication, the whole system starts to break down, and you end up with counselors who are too stressed to do their jobs, which means miserable campers, which means parents don’t pay for another summer, which means…” Shiro sighed and cast a glance over his shoulder toward the heart of the campground. “Which means Allura can’t afford to keep Altea open. I promised her I wouldn’t let that happen, and I meant it.”

“But _why_?” Keith asked. “I mean, no offense, I know you love this camp and all, but it’s kind of a shithole. That other camp across the river -- Galra or whatever -- they want the land, don’t they? They’d probably buy it off her and she wouldn’t have to bust her ass just to keep this place from falling apart.”

Shiro frowned deeply. “This half of the valley has belonged to her family for a long time, and from what she’s told me, it was her father’s pride and joy. His heart was here, and he loved running the camp. She wants to carry on his legacy, and I think she feels… I don’t know, connected to him in some way when she’s here.”

That didn’t really make much sense to Keith either, but family stuff usually didn’t, so he just shrugged and made a face. “Her dad is dead. Hanging on to something that used to be his doesn’t make him any _less_ dead.”

“Trust me, I know. But it’s about a hell of a lot more than just the money for her. And besides,” he went on, an uncharacteristic edge in his voice, “Camp Galra are assholes.”

From behind them, Lance’s voice suddenly echoed. “I see you down there, Shiro! You hiding from me ‘cause you know what’s coming?”

Keith and Shiro both turned around at the same time to see Lance standing at the top of the path, hands on hips and legs apart in a power stance.

“You should be afraid,” he said, expression smug. “I’ve been practicing for this all year. I’m gonna grind you into _dust_ , Shirogane.”

Scoffing, Shiro waved his hand dismissively. “In your dreams.”

“Let’s do this!” Lance hollered. “Get your ass up here and quit stalling!”

Keith half-expected this exchange to end in fists being thrown, but Shiro jogged over and mussed Lance’s hair like an affectionate older brother.

“Keith! You comin’?” Lance asked, elbowing Shiro away and trying to smooth out his wild hair. “Trust me, you don’t want to miss this. This is the year I finally do it: I’m gonna unseat the champion.”

“The champion of what, exactly?” Keith asked, but Lance was too busy dancing around him like an overexcited dog to give him answer.

“C’mon, I’ll race you back! Last one back to the dining hall has to hand-feed me all night!” He fluttered his eyelashes at Keith, snickering, and drawled in an affected Southern accent, “And you look like y’got _real_ soft hands.”

Then he was off at top speed, his giraffe legs eating up the distance. Keith balked -- he hadn’t even _agreed_ to this childish bullshit -- but Shiro clapped him on the shoulder and gave him a little push.

“You’d better start running,” he said, “because he wasn’t kidding.”

Rolling his eyes, Keith launched into a sprint. _Fuck it. If it gets me away from Shiro and his Caring Father Figure act…_

Lance weaved along the dirt path as he raced back, but Keith cut through the woods directly, leaping over branches and dodging uneven patches of ground. Despite Keith’s late start, they both burst through the tree line simultaneously; Lance’s surprise was evident on his face.

Lance took a stumbling detour around one of the picnic tables while Keith nimbly launched himself right over it and hit the ground still running. Keith beat him to the front stoop of the dining hall by a good ten feet. Hunk and Pidge burst into whistling applause.

“Goddamn,” Hunk marveled, “that was impressive. You’re like a… a small, angry cheetah or something.”

Keith’s chest heaved as he caught his breath, and when he looked back at Lance, he expected to see anger or irritation. Instead, Lance flashed him a thumbs-up.

“Next time, new guy,” he promised, breathless. “Next time we race, I’ll kick your ass.”

“Who says there’ll be a next time?” Keith said, and Lance’s smile widened like he knew the answer already.

As it turned out, Shiro was the reigning champion of Camp Altea’s annual eating contest, and had retained the highly prized title for no less than three consecutive summers, according to Pidge.

“Eight burgers!” Hunk told Keith, shaking his head in awe as he flipped a veggie dog on the grill. “He destroyed _eight_ burgers in less than twenty minutes! That man’s record is untouchable.”

“Not this year,” Lance said with a cocky grin. “This is my time to shine.”

Pidge waited impatiently next to Keith, already clutching a paper plate to her chest, a vulturine stare fixed on that veggie dog. “Highly unlikely.”

“Be careful,” Hunk warned. “You might be flying too close to the sun on this one, Lance. Shiro’s a whole lot bigger than you are.”

“ _Fuck_ you, I had a growth spurt over Christmas!” Lance insisted, his face extremely serious, and Keith couldn’t help it -- he spluttered with sudden laughter at the extraordinary intensity, surprising even himself. Lance’s expression broke into delight like sun through the clouds, and both of them snorted at each other until Hunk handed off several plates laden with food and told them to make themselves useful.

The cookout was unadulterated chaos. Each seat was filled, everyone shouting and telling stories; drinks were knocked over; hot dogs rolled off plates and traveled across the table. Shay dropped an entire tub of potato salad in the dirt, and Coran attempted to give a touching speech but ruined it by belching loudly mid-sentence.

Shiro remained the uncontested champion of the eating contest for the fourth summer in a row. Lance puked three hamburgers and half a hot dog into the bushes behind the dining hall.

As twilight came and went and the sky darkened, Keith picked at a plate of cold French fries, listening to Pidge animatedly explain how to start a fire using a battery and a gum wrapper. Lance and Hunk arm-wrestled while Coran played referee. Nearby, Shiro was trying -- and failing -- to teach a couple of girls how to juggle. They pressed in around him with reverent smiles and affectionate touches.

Keith idly wondered if this was what a big family dinner might be like: noisy, messy, crowded, and filled with easy intimacy.

It wasn’t until he saw a small herd of people trailing toward the field lugging blankets and sleeping bags that Keith remembered he had agreed to sleep outside, on the ground, surrounded by these noisy, messy strangers. Fuck.

As a general rule, Keith did not enjoy other people in his immediate personal space. Figuratively _or_ literally. He lived alone and slept alone and he distinctly enjoyed all the benefits that came with it: sprawling across every inch of the space he owned, marking it as his, dropping his dirty clothes wherever he felt like it without bothering to pick them up. He greedily wrapped himself in his bedsheets and crammed all the pillows under his head simply because he could.

Sure, he’d resigned himself to the inevitability of sharing a ten-by-fifteen open-air cabin with three campers for the rest of the summer. Fine. Not ideal, but tolerable. At least he had his own bed, and his job title allowed him to tell the kids to shut the hell up. This was a little different.

Pidge slapped her fist on the table palm-down and pointed at the procession with tangible glee. “Look, they’re setting up tents on the field! Let’s go! Keith, you’re coming with me!”

The bright green grass was already carpeted with quilts. Pidge was nearly vibrating, hopping like an excited rabbit toward a haphazard stack of tent poles and a harried-looking Allura.

“Thank god you’re here, Pidge,” she said, staring at the pole in her own hand like it had personally offended her. “No matter how many times you teach me, I can _never_ remember how to put one of these bloody things together.”

Lance and Hunk ambled up behind Keith, locked in a heated argument.

“Okay, but the White Ranger was _objectively_ cooler than the green one,” Lance said shrilly.

Hunk chopped the air with a decisive hand to cut him off. “No way! Did you see how much ass the Pink Ranger whipped? Bro, her DinoZord was a fucking pterodactyl _._ Come on, that’s cool as hell.”

“Wow. It must be hard for you,” sighed Lance, “being so completely wrong all the time.”

Allura handed Keith a tent pole and he awkwardly demurred, scratching at the cooling sunburn on the back of his neck. “I, uh, I don’t actually know how to build a tent,” he admitted.

 _“Good!”_ Hunk exclaimed, shouldering in and knocking it out of his hand. “Because we’re not sleeping in tents! What’s the point of being outside if you zip yourself into one of those things? Half the fun is waking up on wet grass, wondering how many spiders crawled in your mouth while you were unconscious!”

“Aw, man, you make us do this every year,” Lance complained. “Last summer, there was a torrential downpour in the middle of the night. I had to scoop _mud_ out of my sleeping bag in the _dark_.”

Hunk scattered the remaining pile of tent poles with a well-placed kick. “Hey, Captain Killjoy, summer camp is all about making memories, and that experience was memorable enough that you’re still bitching about it an entire year later. Obviously, it works.”

“Keith?” Lance looked to him, eyes wide and watery. “Help me out here.”

Both options -- sharing a tent and sleeping on the ground -- were equally unappealing to him, so he just shrugged at a deflated Lance. “It doesn’t matter to me. I can fall asleep pretty much anywhere.”

Hunk hooted with glee. “That’s the spirit! Now grab a blanket and help me build this love nest.”

Opting out of the deal, Allura and Coran retreated to their own tent (“but we’ll leave the flap open, just in case,” Allura compromised). Most other counselors did the same, sleeping in groups of twos and threes, their shadows flickering against the walls of their tents as they navigated the complicated geometry of several bodies in a cramped space.

The sky was pitch black by the time Lance, Pidge, Hunk and Keith had mostly finished laying out their bed rolls, the only light coming from the fluorescent glow of a battery-powered lantern nestled in the grass near Keith’s feet. Beyond its radius, visibility was just about zero, so Keith didn’t realize Shiro was _right there_ until he turned around and bumped face-first into his sternum.

“Shit,” Shiro laughed, putting a hand out to steady Keith. “You all right, buddy?”

Keith rubbed the bridge of his nose, taking a step backward. “Quit sneaking up on me,” he snapped.

“I’m sorry -- I promise I’m not doing it on purpose.” Shiro wasn’t quite touching Keith, but neither did he pull away; he let his fingers hover an inch from Keith’s skin, as if waiting to be granted permission again. “I’ll start wearing a bell around my neck.”

“Glad you finally decided to join us, champ,” Lance said sourly.

Shiro looked up. The sharp line of his jaw cast a long shadow over his neck in the lantern’s light. “I was helping Shay wash up, since you savages left the place a disaster. Are you still mad that I beat you in the eating competition again?”

“I’m not mad!” Lance huffed. “Besides, we were pretty much tied.”

“Tied? You puked. Like, not even ten minutes into the contest.” Keith raised his eyebrows.

“Next year, Lance,” Shiro said, clocking Lance in the shoulder. “You’ll get it next year. I can feel it.”

Pidge cleared her throat, interrupting them. “The Fortress of Solitude,” she announced with flourish, “is complete.”

Atop a layer of rumpled quilts and hemmed in by a low wall of pillows, five sleeping bags were crammed together as closely as possible. Pidge had staked a makeshift flag overlooking the whole mess, fashioned from a tent pole and a wrinkled scrap of paper (which Keith recognized as a torn-out page from the employee handbook).

“The flag says this is the Castle of Lions, but you just called it the Fortress of Solitude,” Keith observed. “What's with the names?”

Pidge gaped at him. “Wait, you’ve never heard of -- come on, y’know, like the Fortress of Solitude. No? The place where Superman goes to chill? Seriously? _Never_?”

“Oh,” Keith said. “Yeah. Yeah, I get it now.” He didn’t, actually. As a kid, he’d never really gotten into superhero stuff. His hobbies had mostly been model airplanes and dinosaurs. As he got older, his interests shifted mercurially to anything that kept him out of the house.

Shiro leaned in beside Keith, smoothing out the flag’s edges with pride. “The whole ‘Castle of Lions’ thing is sort of an in-joke. When Pidge and I first met Hunk and Lance a couple summers ago, our cabins happened to have identical activity schedules, so all of us spent pretty much every day together. Allura said we always traveled in a pack, looking out for each other like a pride of lions.”

“Then we watched _The Lion King_ in the rec center on a rainy day and Shiro cried like a baby,” Pidge added. “After that, it stuck.”

“Mufasa…” Shiro sighed mournfully.

Lance flopped into the pile of blankets and sleeping bags with an exaggerated groan. “Oh, god, please don’t get him started. It’s like seeing my dad cry at my sisters’ ballet recitals.”

“Are you jealous 'cause you wish he'd cry at your ballet recitals, too?” Hunk asked, and Lance stuck his middle finger in the air in response. Snickering, Hunk took a running jump into the pile, landing halfway on top of him.

“You’re crushing me!” Lance hollered into Hunk’s armpit.

Pidge was next, divebombing in between their bodies and pushing them apart like squabbling puppies. “Hey! Cut it out! I swear, if you guys mess up my castle, I’ll quote Mufasa’s death scene until Shiro loses it.”

“All right, all right, enough,” Shiro said, crossing his arms. He was laughing as he spoke, yet there was a subtle undercurrent of authority in his voice that made each of them immediately straighten up -- including Keith, much to his chagrin. “Move over, you three. Keith and I still have to fit in here somehow.”

Hunk rolled over on his back next to Pidge, spreading his arms invitingly. “Plenty of prime real estate right here, big boy.”

“Uh, no. You are _my_ pillow,” Lance said, shifting until he was flush against Hunk’s side. “If you’re making me sleep out here in the freezing cold with all the mosquitos and shit, then I get to use you for your body heat.”

It took nearly twenty minutes of arguing and intermittent slap-fighting before Shiro actually managed to get everyone to shut the fuck up and lie down. His legs were too long for him to fit anywhere except diagonally across the middle, so the rest of them rearranged themselves around him: Pidge tucked under one arm and Hunk leaning against the other, with Lance happily flattened against Hunk’s back.

Keith picked up a sleeping bag, kicked off his shoes, and curled up at the furthest possible edge. Shiro didn’t say anything about it, but Keith knew he wanted to -- he opened his mouth, made a face like he was solving an irritating math problem, then closed it again.

“Everyone good?” Shiro asked, still looking at him.

“Outstanding.” Yanking the zipper until he was cocooned nearly up to his chin, Keith returned the stare point blank. _I hope it really chaps your ass that I’m not playing along with this feel-good team-building shit._

Little by little, the moon rose higher and the field fell silent. There were no more moving shadows inside the tents. Despite the fact that he was too exhausted to even hold his eyes open anymore, Keith didn’t fall asleep; as everything else went quiet, he began to hear all the soft human sounds of the strangers around him. Hunk’s breathing deepened into a slow cadence and Lance twitched in his sleep a few times. Pidge snored with a soft whistling sound. Shiro was silent.

Underneath it all swelled the chirp and hum of insects. _I never knew crickets were so goddamn loud,_ Keith thought -- but the noise didn’t actually bother him. Its rhythmic ebb and flow pulled his tired brain closer to sleep.

Eyes still closed, he curled into his borrowed sleeping bag, listening to the fabric rustle. An insect flitted by his face and he swatted at it.

A few feet away, Shiro sighed and stretched, joints popping. He whispered something to Pidge and she hummed sleepily in response.

Keith froze, hand still suspended in the air mid-swing, and cracked open one eye.

“I wanna see Mars,” she said, slurring through a yawn. “An’ Venus.”

“Sorry, kiddo. This time of year, Venus is gone by sunset. But here, look -- that big bright one is Mars, and a few degrees below it, that’s Saturn.”

Pidge yawned again. “When I become an astronaut, will you come to my mission launches?”

“Every single one.” He ruffled her hair. “I’ll be right at the front, waving a lace handkerchief and blowing you kisses.”

“Gross,” she murmured, then dropped her head back to his chest. “Maybe I’ll see my dad up there.”

It was quiet for several moments. Shiro absentmindedly rubbed circles on Pidge’s shoulder with the pad of his thumb. “If you do,” he murmured, “let him know I miss him, too.”

Keith wished the hard ground would crack itself open and swallow him entirely. Was it possible to die from awkwardness? Could he find out? He shouldn’t have been eavesdropping on this conversation. He hated it. He hated Shiro’s awful sincerity and Pidge’s wide-eyed affection. He hated that no one had ever spoken to him with the kind of tenderness that Shiro used with her. He hated them both, and he hated himself for being so bothered.

Also, holy shit, was Pidge’s father _dead?_

_Something we have in common, I guess._

Pidge’s whistling snores started up again, but Shiro kept tracing soft circles on her shoulder, like he needed something to do with his hands. Maybe he couldn’t sleep, either.

Something buzzed close to Keith's ear, a high-pitched whine that sounded suspiciously like a mosquito.

_Goddammit._

_Don’t move. If you swing at it, he’ll know you’re awake. Don’t do it. You can handle one mosquito bite._

The mosquito circled him a few times.

_Listen, little dude, I’m super dehydrated and all I’ve had to eat today is an apple and some dollar-store burger meat fried in old grease. My blood is probably the consistency of pudding and my nutritional value is hovering at zero. Do us both a favor and move along._

His resistance crumbled when he actually _felt_ its nasty little feet land on him, tickling the hairs on his neck. He jerked upright and slapped at it blindly, shuddering at the wet spot where the mosquito burst against his palm.

“Keith,” Shiro said, startled. “You’re awake.”

“Yeah, I just -- I was just, uh…”

_Unintentionally spying on you while you had a conversation with Pidge about her probably-dead dad._

“I was just looking at the stars,” Keith finished lamely with an inward cringe. “It seems like… like they’re a lot brighter out here. It’s not like that in the city -- harder to see them. Light pollution or something, I dunno.”

Shiro smiled and nodded, his hair whispering against the cloth of his sleeping bag. “It’s beautiful, right? I’ve slept in this field dozens of times but I think I’ll never get used to the view. The sky’s so clear you can see stars that I’d only ever _read_ about before I got here.”

“You read about stars,” Keith repeated, incredulous.

“I’ve always been fascinated by astronomy and outer space. When I was really young, I got a job scrubbing graffiti off concrete walls just so I could pay for a lifetime membership to the local planetarium.”

“Your parents didn’t buy it for you?” Keith asked. He was under the impression that was the kind of thing other kids’ parents did all the time.

“No way. Outside of birthdays and holidays, my parents just didn’t do presents. My dad thought of them as handouts; he was all about strong work ethic and respect. Blood, sweat and tears, you only get what you earn, et cetera, et cetera.” Shiro twirled his finger in a lazy circle like he was listing items off a very long, very familiar list.

“Oh.”

“They _did_ give me a big book of star charts for Christmas one year. I memorized the whole thing. It’s still sitting on my bookshelf at home, although it’s falling apart by now.”

“Tell me the truth: did you get beat up a lot at school? Because it sounds like you were a fucking nerd,” Keith said flatly.

“Surprisingly, no,” Shiro laughed. “My dad was an asshole, but he taught me not to take shit from anyone. And my mom taught me how to throw a punch.”

“Oh,” Keith said again. _Oh_ was his fallback when he didn’t really know what else to say, so he used it a lot. He hid a yawn behind his hand.

“I still remember all the names of the constellations. Lie down and look up -- I’ll teach you a couple.”

 _Stars aren’t really my thing. I’m tired. I don't want to wake Pidge._ Keith rifled through a list of potential ways to say ‘I don’t care.’ _I’m actually blind and have no idea what a star even is._

Instead, he sighed, settled into his sleeping bag on his back, and stared up at the dome of the sky peppered with pinpricks of light.

“Well, you probably know the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper,” Shiro said, one arm pillowed behind his head and the other extended toward the heavens. “Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.”

Keith grunted.

“Over there, that’s Cygnus, though most people just call it the Northern Cross. See the long bands of clouded light behind it? You’re looking right at the Milky Way. That light is from millions of star clusters, too far away for us to see.”

“Wow,” Keith whispered. Listening to Shiro ramble was making it hard to keep his eyes open and he really didn’t give a fuck about star clusters -- but Shiro gave _so_ _much_ of a fuck that it was hard to ignore him, even for Keith. The awe in his voice was palpable, heady.

“Straight above it is Hercules. It’s easy to spot because you can trace each line of stars that make up its body.” Shiro mapped the constellation in the air slowly with his fingers so that Keith would be able to follow along.

His hands were broad and rough, inlaid with veins and paper-thin scars.

 _What the hell happened to you?_ Keith wondered sleepily, and the question burned in his throat.

Shiro’s body was imperfect, scarred seams visible like a cracked vase glued back together. Keith wanted so badly to know what it was that had shattered him, but he had no right to ask.

Shiro shifted slightly and Pidge groaned, scrubbing the heel of her palm over her nose before slinging her arm over his chest and settling back into sleep.

“Hey,” Shiro said. “Keith.”

Keith picked up his head to look at him, frowning.

He was on his side facing Keith, Pidge curled against him. “I’m glad you’re here,” he murmured. “Even if you hate it.”

“Oh my god, fuck _off_ ,” Keith wearily groaned, dragging his hands over his face, “with your fucking haircut and fucking star charts and your fucking… relentless optimism. Jesus Christ, you’re like a Mr. Rogers episode come to life.” He rolled over and yanked the hood of his sleeping bag over his head. “I’m going to sleep.”

Through the layers of fabric, he could hear Shiro quietly snorting with helpless laughter. Tired, bruised, crusted with sweat, hair greasy and skin sunburnt, Keith _should_ have been annoyed by that, yet he felt his own dizzy, exhausted laughter bubbling up unbidden like stomach acid. He pressed his face hard into the fleece lining of the sleeping bag and kept his smile secret and safe, hidden in his cocoon.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all my friends and followers who volunteered to let me use their names for my campers! I hope you guys enjoy seeing your camper-selves running around eating dirt and torturing Keith. Plenty more of you will show up in future chapters.
> 
> This fic is now a cutting-edge multimedia experience: I commissioned [Istehlurvz](http://istehlurvz.tumblr.com) for art of Camp Altea Shiro and Keith!

[ art by [istehlurvz](http://istehlurvz.tumblr.com) ]

 

* * *

 

Pre-dawn mist still hovered over the valley like a shroud when Keith first opened his eyes. Around him, the Castle of Lions was largely deserted, most of the sleeping bags empty, and several yawning counselors were already breaking down their tents around the edge of the field.

Keith picked up his head and immediately winced. Fuck, everything _hurt_. His shoulder was cramped where it was digging into the ground, his ribs still ached after his tumble yesterday, and his left foot was completely numb.

“G’morning, sunshine,” Shiro said, his voice still thick with sleep even though he was up and already dressed in dark jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. The white tuft of hair over his forehead was mussed and his smile was a little dopey, lingering on the edge of semi-consciousness. “Ready to face the day?”

Keith groaned. He wanted to go back to sleep, but he was desperately uncomfortable.

“New guy! Get your ass up!” Lance said, hurling a pillow at his face; Keith caught it and lobbed it right back, bouncing it off his knees. “We have two hours before everything goes to shit, and there’s a ton of stuff to do.”

Slowly, Keith sat up and wiggled his toes, trying to regain feeling in his numb foot. “What happens in two hours?”

“The campers arrive,” Pidge said, muffled and ominous, from inside her sleeping bag a few feet away. Only her wild hair was visible, and she didn’t seem intent on moving.

“How come she gets to sleep in?” Keith protested.

Stalking away with several bed rolls tucked under his arm, Lance called over his shoulder, “Because she’s the favorite,” like it was completely obvious.

Shrugging, Shiro didn’t even try to argue. He gave Keith an apologetic smile and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “C’mon, pancakes and coffee in the dining hall. You should eat -- you’re gonna need it.”

 

* * *

 

No matter how many times Lance tried to warn him, there was no way Keith could have possibly been prepared. At all. For any of this.

Yesterday’s bustling madness didn’t even compare to what was happening in the field in front of his eyes. He’d entered some unknown ring of hell, a diabolic furnace powered by the joyful screams of children. The only thing keeping him upright was the six gallons of caffeine that he’d pumped into his body, guzzling mug after mug of weak, gritty coffee as fleets of sedans and station wagons pulled up the dirt driveway to unload their aforementioned screaming children.

Shiro, Nyma and Rolo waved cars along, Pidge and Lance marked down arrivals on their rosters, and Hunk welcomed each new camper with a high-five and a nametag. Allura was soothing parents too clingy to release their kids, reassuring them that they would get a weekly postcard, while Keith hovered at the fringes, herding children and grunting noncommittally when anyone asked him questions.

Piles of suitcases, backpacks, scrunched-up sleeping bags and stuffed animals littered the grass. Returning campers squealed in recognition and hugged each other while the new kids fidgeted awkwardly.

Keith was wearing a red t-shirt, per Allura’s request that each leader wear their cabin colors that day. Campers were shunted off in a different direction according to their assigned cabins, and it wasn’t long before a small tribe of nervous children amassed themselves within Keith’s orbit.

“Hi,” one of them said shyly. Pasted on a tie-dyed t-shirt that hung nearly to her knees, her nametag read _Bailey_ in letters printed with perfect precision. Behind her, two other kids kicked their feet in the dirt and focused on looking at anything except each other.

“Um,” Keith said, “are you… one of mine?”

Bailey nodded and tapped her nametag where it said _Red Cabin_ at the top.

Instantly, Keith realized he had made an astronomical fucking mistake. He had absolutely no clue what he was doing. What in the hell had possessed him to think he could possibly be responsible for three defenseless humans? They were so _small_. Bailey looked up at him with an innocent smile and Keith wanted to protect her from the entire world.

“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Uh, cool. That’s cool. Great.”

She stared at him, and he blinked back at her owlishly.

“Is that Bailey I see?” said Shiro, suddenly coming up behind Keith, smelling like sweat and that sweet sunblock. He grabbed her beneath her armpits and swung her around in a wild hug while she clung to him like a cackling monkey until he dropped her back on the grass. “Holy cow, kiddo, look how _big_ you got since last year. What are they feeding you, huh?”

Bailey preened, flexing one skinny arm. “I like Brussels sprouts now,” she announced with the kind of self-satisfied pride one might expect from a Nobel Laureate or someone who had cured cancer.

“You’re kidding,” Shiro said with what sounded like genuine astonishment. “Well, it shows. Remind me not to pick a fight with you, ‘cause you’d probably win.” He ruffled her short hair and she grabbed his broad wrist with both her hands, twisting away from him in giggling protest.

With an infuriatingly effortless smile, Shiro beckoned to the two silent kids who had been lingering on the outskirts. According to the stickers on their chests, their names were Kayla and Max. Kayla chewed on the end of her thick, dark braid while Max nervously twisted his fingers in his wrinkled shirt.

“Your first time at camp?” he asked, and they both nodded. “Well, you’re in the right cabin. Keith’s a first-timer, too, so you guys’ll get to learn the ropes together. And hey, our cabins are neighbors, so we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”

Shiro gestured to his own tiny tribe of campers. “Black Cabin,” he said, “meet Red Cabin.” Cabin assignments were determined randomly and, by luck of the draw, Shiro had ended up with three boys. He tagged each one with a scarred hand as he introduced them: small, gregarious Kai, sullen Finn, and greasy Beck, who looked like he hadn’t seen a shower in at least two weeks.

“Hey,” Keith mumbled, and Shiro gave him a look like, _That’s all you’ve got?_

Keith shrugged at him with one shoulder.

A battered black pickup truck pulled into the midst of the chaos and it was apparently some kind of sign from God: Lance and Hunk both took off at a run towards it, Shiro tailing behind at a more leisurely pace, and Allura’s face lit up with a grin so heart-wrenchingly filled with joy that Keith couldn’t even look directly at her.

The driver’s side door swung open and out tumbled a speckled mess of fur, barking and hopping. The dog sprinted for Allura first, and she covered it in kisses.

“Hello, baby,” she cooed, and the dog rolled over onto its back, paws kicking in the air with glee. Its white fur was covered in black splotches and it had mismatched eyes: one dark brown, the other pale blue.

Hunk fell into the dirt and administered the most enthusiastic belly rubs Keith had ever seen. “Who’s a good girl? Who’s the best dog in the universe?” he babbled. “You are! It’s you! I’m talking about you!”

Several of the kids came over and the dog greeted every single one of them, nearly vibrating in excitement as they giggled and patted it with sticky fingers. Keith liked dogs just fine, but he stayed behind.

“That’s Mouse,” Pidge said, pushing her glasses up her nose, and Keith jumped. He hadn’t even heard her approach. “Allura’s dog. She’s kind of the unofficial camp mascot.”

Keith nodded. “Seems that way.”

Coran finally emerged from the truck, wearing a bucket hat and a beatific smile. “Just picked her up from the groomer’s place in town,” he explained to Allura, “but she jumped into a mess of brambles the instant I got her out the door.”

Allura picked a burr out of Mouse’s bushy tail. “I’d expect nothing less, frankly. Was she well-behaved otherwise?”

“An _angel,_ ” Coran gushed. “Mostly.”

Mouse broke away and bounded over to Shiro, who dropped into a crouch and held his arms out to her. He yelped when she knocked into his chest at full speed, toppling him over onto the grass, and shielded his face from her tongue.

“I missed you too, Mouse,” Shiro laughed, wiping drool off his cheek and smushing her jowls between his palms lovingly. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth.

“How come Mouse wasn’t around for the festivities last night?” Keith asked Pidge.

“Joint custody arrangement. She splits her time between Allura’s apartment and her ex-girlfriend’s farm outside town. Part of the deal when they broke up, I guess.” Pidge shrugged.

“Oh.” _Ex-girlfriend. Huh._ Keith looked at Allura, weighing this new bit of information.

Part of him had expected she would suddenly look different somehow, like he’d unraveled some secret mystery that would allow him to see her more clearly, but she was the same. Big smile, bright eyes, white-blonde hair piled atop her head in a bun. As usual.

She looked over, caught Keith and Pidge staring, and waved. Pidge waved back, but Keith’s hands stayed buried in his pockets. With a sigh, Pidge grabbed his forearm and flopped his hand around in a haphazard wave until he yanked it away. Allura’s laugh echoed back to them, clear and musical.

“You’re not very good at people, are you?” Pidge asked him with a funny little grin. “S’okay. Me neither.”

With Mouse properly greeted and belly rubs appropriately dispensed, Hunk and Shiro climbed atop a picnic table to do a quick and dirty headcount, checking and double-checking the rosters, then they signaled to Allura.

“Ready to roll, boss,” Hunk announced. “Gang’s all here.”

Allura gave him an excited thumbs-up, then cupped her palms around her mouth and shouted, “Counselors, gather your campers and head down to the round!”

 _The_ _round_ was, as Keith had learned, what everyone called the open-air amphitheatre next to the field. It was hardly more than a sunken grassy clearing, with rows of rough-hewn benches arranged in a semi-circle around a raised plywood stage where Allura was currently standing.

Keith fell back and let Shiro take point, both the Red and Black campers intermingling. He watched Shiro chatter to the kids about their favorite color and and beckon them to sit on one of the benches. Keith had no fucking clue _how_ he did it, but the kids seemed to listen to Shiro; he had some inexplicable force, some magnetic pull, some _way_ he had about him that made the kids happily obey every one of his commands. None of them looked at Keith; their eyes were fixed on Shiro.

Mouse, too, followed at their heels, nudging Shiro’s hand insistently until he finally scratched her ears after they sat down. The campers crowded Shiro, occupying every inch of space on the bench, so Keith awkwardly turned away to sit somewhere else.

“Hey,” Shiro said, his voice carrying over the general din. “Move your butts and make room for Keith. He deserves a spot, too.”

Like parting the Red Sea, the kids crammed even more tightly together, clearing several inches on the splintered bench -- just barely enough for Keith to fit. He deliberated uncertainly for a minute until Shiro tugged at the hem of his t-shirt.

“Sit.”

That goddamn magnetic pull. That goddamn smile.

“You have a poor concept of personal space,” Keith deadpanned as he sat. It was more than just an offhand jab. Shiro was constantly throwing an arm around someone’s shoulders, ruffling their hair, tickling and teasing and roughhousing. It was like another language to Keith, one that Shiro spoke fluently.

Elbows on his knees and chin in hand, Shiro looked at him. “Want me to move?” he asked.

Keith shrugged and stared down at the scrubby ground between his worn sneakers, watching a cricket catapult itself through the grass with determination.

_You’re not very good at people, are you?_

“No,” he said. He quickly added, “I don’t care, do whatever you want,” but the corners of Shiro’s mouth were already turning up in an easy smile.

Shiro’s hip pressed against his, heavy and warm and uncomplicated.

Allura cleared her throat, and counselors hushed their campers. Mouse bounded up on stage and sat dutifully next to Allura like an empress’ bodyguard.

“My name is Allura, and I’m the director of Altea Sleepaway Camp,” she said proudly. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see all these beautiful faces, both new and old. The next eight weeks are going to be truly magical.”

The cricket landed on the toe of Keith’s shoe and he shook it off as he rolled his eyes a little. God help her, Allura actually sounded like she _believed_ what she was saying. Maybe she did. Everyone else certainly seemed to enable her delusional love for this place.

“Many of you might be very far away from home, in a new, unfamiliar environment, where you don’t know anyone yet. You might miss your parents or your friends. Maybe you’re a little bit afraid. There’s nothing wrong with that -- sometimes life can be scary.” She spread her arms wide. “But you’re not alone. Maybe it sounds a little silly, but I promise you, it’s true: Camp Altea is a family, and you’re part of it.”

Out of the corner of his eye several benches over, Keith saw Coran nod emphatically along to Allura’s words, looking farklempt.

“Some of you have been here before, and some of you haven’t,” she went on. “Some of you are experienced sailors and swimmers and horseback riders, and some of you aren’t. Well, learning new things is the most exciting part of summer camp, and every one of us -- even the counselors, even _me_  -- we all have so much to learn.”

One of Shiro’s boys sneezed and wiped his wet palm on his shirt while Bailey wriggled impatiently in her seat. Max was half-asleep, his head drooping. Kayla was the only one facing forward, paying rapt attention -- but Keith realized she wasn’t looking at Allura as he noticed her eyes following the back-and-forth wag of Mouse’s tail.

“That’s a Border Collie,” she mumbled to no one in particular. “Did you know, when a dog has two different-colored eyes, that’s called h-hert… heter… heterochromia?”

She said it slowly, stumbling over the complex syllables and sounding it out, her brows beetled in concentration. _Het-er-o-chro-mi-a._

Keith blinked. He had never heard the word _heterochromia_ before in his life. “How old are you?” he asked.

“I just turned eight,” she told him.

Shiro elbowed Keith and put his finger to his lips. When Keith gave him a skeptical look, he shrugged. “Gotta set a good example,” he whispered.

“So, with that in mind,” Allura said, “let’s get to the good part! After this assembly, you’ll all be heading to your very first activities under the watchful gaze of your cabin heads. They’ll tell you everything you need to know and answer all your questions.” She glanced at her various counselors. “Remember, the first day can be a little overwhelming for everyone. Be gentle with yourselves -- and most importantly, have fun!” She clapped her hands and shooed them away. “Go on!”

Keith dug in his pocket and unfolded the dog-eared, wrinkled piece of paper that listed his weekly schedule, neatly arranged into blocks of time. This morning’s block merely said _water activities_.

Water activities. That was vague enough that it didn’t necessarily _have_ to mean swimming, right? It could be anything. They could spend the morning building sandcastles. He could do this. He could be whatever a camp counselor was.

Unfortunately, Keith didn’t fully understand what was happening until he was standing on the damp wooden pier having a staring contest with Lance and his squadron of waiting canoes.

_Fuck._

Neither of them said anything. Lance’s smug smile was enough.

The blue cabin’s campers were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the end of the pier, dangling their feet in the water together. They already appeared to be thick as thieves, while Keith’s campers would hardly even look at each other.

“Hello, my little cherubs,” Lance sing-songed. “My name’s Lance, I’m the head of the blue cabin, and welcome to my favorite place in the whole wide universe.” He struck a power pose, hands on hips, staring out over the lake. “Drink it in. Are you drinking? Okay, good. Now c’mere and let me teach you about water safety -- yes, I know, boring but necessary. I’ll be quizzing you at the end to see how well you listened, and you get a reward for every correct answer.”

“What kind of reward?” one of Lance’s campers asked, kicking an arc of pond water into the air.

“The only kind that matters.” Lance pulled a fun-size chocolate bar from his pocket. It looked kind of mashed and melted, but all the kids were instantly trained on it like hunting dogs.

Keith frowned. “You’re gonna give them candy? It’s nine in the morning.”

“What are you, the cops?” Lance tossed one of the candy bars at Keith -- he liked to throw things, apparently -- but Keith let it sail past him and land in the water with a sad little _plonk._ “Okay, so we need to work on your reflexes _and_ your inability to have fun. Noted.”

While Lance coached the kids, starting with salient points like _drowning will kill you_ and _yeah, you can pee in the lake, it’s fine_ , Keith tugged life vests over each of their heads and attempted to buckle them. It was like trying to put a sweater on a cat -- the kids squirmed and complained, saying the vest was too tight, and Keith sighed.

“It’s supposed to be that way,” he explained repeatedly. Probably one of the only pieces of information he ever retained from his loathsome canoeing trip as a kid. “Otherwise it’ll slip off when it gets wet.”

“I don’t like it,” Bailey whined, pulling at the buckles. “It doesn’t feel good.”

“Too bad, I don’t care. Cut it out and sit _still,_ ” he snapped angrily, his patience running thin.

Bailey stared at him, wide-eyed, for a moment before her lower lip started to tremble and Keith’s heart cracked and shattered. The guilt hit him like a truck.

Waving his hands, he pleaded, “Oh, no -- no, no, don’t cry, don’t do that --”

“Everyone properly outfitted for our first seafaring adventure?” Lance asked, making the rounds and testing each vest for its snugness. When he got to Bailey, he paused, looking between her and Keith. “You need a minute?”

“It’s fine,” Keith mumbled, not meeting Lance’s eyes. _Oh, yeah, hey, Lance, it’s less than three hours into my first official day as a camp counselor and I already made one of my kids cry, so if you could just get Allura to fire me immediately and save us all eight weeks of hassle, that would be great._

One fat tear dropped off her eyelashes and landed on her life vest and, stricken with crushing guilt, Keith watched it roll over the water-resistant fabric.

Lance kneeled on the pier next to Bailey, squeezing her shoulder. “What’s buggin’ you?” he asked. “Are you worried about getting in a canoe? It’s okay. I’ll be out there with you.”

Bailey shook her head, snuffling. “I don’t like the vest,” she hiccupped, sounding so dejected and pathetic that the knife in Keith’s dead heart twisted even deeper. “Too tight.”

It was a stupid thing for her to cry about, and a stupider thing for him to lose his patience over. He wanted to slither off the pier into the water and sink to the bottom.

“Well, we can loosen a few of the straps, but it has to stay on,” Lance told her. He looked at Keith, eyebrows raised in confusion. Keith kept his gaze fixed stubbornly on the wood beneath his sneakers, the planks bulging and warped from years of damp.

“You good, dude?” Lance asked him.

Keith memorized each individual strand of slimy algae that floated on the surface of the water. “Fantastic.”

Lance snorted, started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He shoved a life vest at Keith. “Whatever you say. Put this on and get in a boat.”

 _Goddammit._ Keith had almost forgotten he was expected to _participate_ in every activity. Bailey stared at him with wounded eyes and he sighed, buckling it over his chest in resignation.

“I don’t like boats,” he grumbled, which was something of an understatement. There wasn’t anything he liked about the idea of going in the water in one of these leaky, battered canoes.

“You can swim, right?” Lance asked over his shoulder as he lined up the campers along the pier, assigning them each to a boat. He asked it casually, a silly afterthought, because obviously Keith knew how to swim. What grown-ass adult doesn’t know how to swim? Of course he did.

“Of course I do,” Keith lied, taking the oars that Lance handed to him.

“Good, because these things tip over pretty much all the time. We had a bunch of people drown last year because they didn’t know to swim.” He leaned over the edge, peering into the dark water. “Their bodies are probably still down there.”

“Nuh-uh, shut up,” one of Lance’s campers hollered. “He’s lying! He says that every time.”

Keith checked his life vest three times over, making sure it was securely attached to his body.

Bailey had exiled herself from the main lineup, standing a few feet away, still rubbing at her face and looking generally very sad. Keith thought about what Pidge said, about what it meant to be _good at people_ , and he sighed.

“I’m going with Bailey,” he told Lance, and he came to stand next to her. Tentatively, he held out a hand and patted her on the shoulder, his palm squeaking against the rubbery fabric. She crossed her arms and jerked away, and Keith withdrew.

“All right, you little gremlins!” Lance clapped his hands and pointed to the shore where several canoes were waiting on the sand. “Let’s get out there!”

Bailey was so sullen and uncooperative that Keith had to bodily lift her and place her in their canoe. He let her sit in front so he wouldn’t have to see her pouting at him, while he folded himself into the back of the little boat, laying his oar carefully across his lap.

Lance pushed each canoe over the sand and launched them all into the water with a cocky salute before hopping into his own. Keith gripped the sides of the canoe as it wobbled, cutting unsteadily across the lake; when Bailey shifted in her seat, the canoe bounced with her. Keith squeezed his eyes shut.

“Paddle left, then right! Work in tandem with your teammates!” Lance commanded, his voice echoing off the water. “One-two, one-two -- keep a rhythm!”

“Okay,” Keith said under his breath, exhaling. “One-two, one-two. Okay.” He hefted his oar and started to paddle, feeling the gentle tug and pull of the lake. It took him several tries before he figured out exactly _how_ to do it (since he hadn’t been paying attention when Lance explained it), but it wasn’t long before he was cutting powerfully through the water with long, confident strokes, shifting sides smoothly. _Left, right. One, two._

It wasn’t so bad. Keith started to feel a little foolish for how much he’d been dreading getting into the water again.

At the helm of a blue canoe, Lance came up behind them. “Hey, so, uh, you’re going in circles,” he said flatly.

Keith looked up.

All the other canoes were puttering toward the heart of the lake, leaving gentle eddies in their wake as they drifted away, while Bailey and Keith were hardly past the shoreline. Bailey hadn’t even touched her oar, so Keith had been proudly steering them in stationary loops.

“Oh,” Keith said.

Lance floated closer, bringing their boats flush with remarkable precision, and flicked his gaze between the two of them. “I dunno what you did,” he said softly, “but you gotta fix it. That’s your job. They’re more important than you are.” He gestured at Bailey, at the campers splashing their oars in the water, and paddled away.

With a soft clatter and a frustrated sigh, Keith rested his own oar against the bench he was sitting on and leaned forward. “C’mon, you can’t sulk forever,” he said to Bailey’s back.

She hunched in on herself further, her life vest bunching up around her armpits, making her look like an angry yellow turtle.

“I owe you an apology. I said a shi--” Keith caught himself, coughed politely, and tried again. “I said a mean thing, and I’m sorry.”

It was silent for a while. The canoe rocked side to side, gentle and calm.

“I miss my mom,” Bailey said, apropos of nothing, and Keith realized what he probably should have understood earlier: this wasn’t about the stupid fucking life vest at all. It probably never had been.

“Oh. Yeah.” He swirled a fingertip in the water, watching the way the ripples traveled outward further and further. “I know how that feels.” He thought of all the things he wished someone had said to him when he was a scared, lonely little kid who just wanted a goddamn hug.

“Look, you didn’t do anything wrong,” he went on quietly. “You have every right to be angry at me, ‘cause I messed up. You were counting on me, and I should’ve listened to you. I’m gonna try to fix it and prove that you can trust me, all right?”

The canoe swayed as Bailey twisted around to look at him, and Keith winced, holding on to the side.

“You promise?” she said, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

He held a hand out, pinkie extended. “I promise.”

Bailey locked her pinkie with his, her hand so small, and when she smiled he saw the gap along her bottom teeth where two were growing back in.

Lance was right: she was more important than Keith. He was almost twenty now, and if he’d ever had a childhood, it was long since over, all the damage already done. He’d given up on figuring out how to untangle all the ugly knots inside of him at this point. But Bailey -- and Max, and Kayla, and every other kid at camp -- they were still wide-eyed and knock-kneed, not yet warped or broken by all the awful, backbreaking shit that life could give them.

 _Jesus._ All this because her life vest was uncomfortable. Not even lunchtime yet and already Keith was exhausted.

“They’re leaving us in the dust,” Keith said, jerking his chin at the cluster of boats in the center of the lake, kids squawking as they slapped the water with their paddles and splashed each other. “Let’s go catch up so we can race circles around Lance.”

None of the canoes tipped, nobody drowned, and after Keith and Lance dragged all the boats back up on shore, Lance distributed those tiny candy bars to each of the eager campers.

He held out his last one to Keith. “You earned it,” he said.

Keith sighed and let him drop it into his palm. It was melted and soft, tasting like chalky sugar and cheap chocolate, and Lance sat cross-legged next to him in the sand while they ate their shitty candy bars in tired, sun-soaked silence, and Keith felt like he understood why this was Lance’s favorite place in the whole wide universe.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, as always, to everyone who reads and enjoys my stuff. My heart gets all tender when I think about you guys.
> 
> A special thank you to [meeokie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/meeokie) for beta reading, and for constantly reminding me that Shiro is very big and he has very big hands and he should touch Keith with them.

“Congratulations,” Shiro said, standing at the bottom step of the red cabin. “You survived your first day of camp.”

A battery-powered lantern hung from one rickety rafter, illuminating Shiro’s smile. Though other cabins were loud with chatter and laughter, Keith’s campers were quiet and shy as they rummaged through their suitcases, pulling out pajamas, toothbrushes, and various species of stuffed animals.

Keith shrugged, scratching at a mosquito bite on his forearm and inspecting it. “Yeah, well,” he mumbled, because he didn’t know what else to say. He felt that way often around Shiro, like something was stuck in his throat and he didn’t know why. He sucked his bottom lip in frustration, trying to speak around it. “It wasn’t that bad.”

This was partially a lie. He was exhausted, sunburnt, covered in bug bites, aching and bruised and sticky and smelly and ready to fall asleep where he stood. He’d made one of his campers cry and he still wasn’t sure if he’d actually managed to mend that hurt; he’d mixed up his schedule, gotten lost in the woods, doused himself in the face with bug spray, forgotten his campers’ names, slipped on the field while teaching them how to play soccer and scraped his ass. He felt woefully unprepared for the next eight weeks.

But there was truth in it, too, a little surprising yet undoubtedly real: it really _hadn’t_ been that bad.

Bailey hummed to herself as she arranged a handful of plastic action figures on the wooden nightstand next to her cot, superheroes wearing garish spandex with their fists outstretched.

“I’m about to take my kids out to the bathrooms to get ready for bed,” Shiro told him, holding up a flashlight. “Thought we could all go together.”

Keith nodded and ushered Kayla, Max and Bailey into a crooked line; together with the black cabin, they trekked up the grassy path. The bathrooms were a little more modern than the rest of the camp’s facilities, but not by much: the tile floor was cracked, the showers were cramped, and half the stall doors didn’t lock properly.

Taking a free sink at the end of the line, Keith ran the tap on cold and scrubbed his face with soap, washing away as much of the day’s grime as he possibly could. He drank from his cupped palms, raked a wet hand through his tangled hair, and lazily brushed his teeth with one eye on his campers.

Shiro spat in the sink and tipped his head back to loudly gargle a mouthful of water, making the kids snort and giggle. Max attempted to mimic him but ended up sputtering water all over the front of his shirt; Shiro gave him a consolatory pat on the back.

“Time’s up,” Shiro announced, wiping his chin. “Those teeth better be squeaky clean. I’ll be checking.”

The campers filed out of the bathroom one by one, baring their teeth for Shiro to inspect: he gently clasped their chins, peering in their mouths, then nodded in mock-stern approval and waved them along. Keith brought up the end of the march, wiping the last of the damp off his face with the hem of his t-shirt.

Shiro stopped him with a raised eyebrow, and the campers turned back to look expectantly.

“I know how to brush my teeth,” Keith said, squinting at him.

“Standard procedure,” Shiro replied, pursing his lips in what looked like a poorly-concealed smile. “No exceptions.”

For just a second, he wondered if Shiro got off on embarrassing him in front of everyone else, but that seemed like a remarkably self-centered thought. Rolling his eyes, he opened his mouth.

Shiro bent down and leaned in close, smelling like mint and sweat.

What Keith hadn’t expected was the warm, soft pressure of Shiro’s fingers against the line of his jaw. His hands were big, skin a little rough. His thumb skated over the point of Keith’s chin -- close, intimate, foreign, unwelcome.

Keith’s body tightened like a knot and he jerked away.

“Don’t --” he stuttered suddenly, “don’t do that.”

Shiro backed off a half-step, eyes on Keith’s face in concern.

Keith didn’t like being touched without permission or warning. Even something as mundane as a friendly hug made him awkward, vulnerable; the feeling of someone else’s skin lingered a long time. It was too much, that closeness. Jesus, Keith couldn’t remember the last time another person had touched his face, much less without _asking_ first.

When Shiro opened his mouth, presumably to apologize, Keith turned away. “It’s fine,” he said. “Just don’t.”

He picked up the flashlight and led the silent parade of campers back to his cabin without waiting for Shiro.

As he ducked under his mosquito netting and curled into himself on his squeaky cot, feeling the pad of a thumb ghosting over and over again along his jaw, Bailey whispered goodnight to each of her superheroes.

 

* * *

 

A wordless apology in the form of a cup of black coffee was waiting for him when he got to the dining hall.

Shiro was already sitting at one of the long tables, picking fruit out of a sodden paper bowl with his fingers while Pidge yawned into her hash browns. Campers in tow, Keith tried to skulk past the two of them and avoid the encounter entirely, but Shiro caught him with a smile.

“Morning.” Shiro pushed the steaming mug in Keith’s direction. “Here. I don’t know what you like in your coffee, so I just, uh…” He waved a hand, looking up at Keith, his smile faltering.

The red cabin kids darted off toward the breakfast line and Keith was alone.

“Black coffee is fine,” Keith murmured. He sat, swinging his legs over the bench and trying to swallow whatever that fucking thing in his throat was.

Shiro popped a grape in his mouth. “You gonna get some food?”

“Not usually hungry in the morning.” Keith knuckled at his eyes. His hair was still wet from his lukewarm, three-minute shower.

“Nuh-uh.” Pidge stared at him with sleepy consternation. “You have to eat _something_. Breakfast is important. I’m going back for seconds anyway -- what d’you want?” She hopped up from the table and pushed her glasses up on her nose.

Keith blinked. “Eggs? Eggs are fine, I think.” He rarely ate breakfast, preferring instead to settle for coffee and a lazy cigarette, smoked while he was still naked in bed and leaning his elbows on the sill of his open window.

The dining hall was bustling with noise and activity despite the early hour, but the silence between him and Shiro felt louder still. Keith laid his head on his crossed forearms and let his eyes slip closed. He didn’t know how to deal with the complicated politics of hurt feelings, and he didn’t want to.

He hadn’t realized he actually dozed off until he felt something hit his elbow, jostling him awake: a plastic tray bearing a plate heaped high with eggs, toast, and greasy sausage. Pidge gave him a thumbs up as he mumbled his thanks, while his campers seated themselves on either side of him like a faithful entourage.

The kids destroyed their breakfasts in under five minutes, sucking down food like they hadn’t eaten in a week, then immediately started squirming.

“If you’re done,” Shiro told them, “you can go wreak havoc outside until it’s time for morning activities.”

Like racehorses out of the gate, Keith’s campers made a beeline outdoors without looking back. From where he was sitting, Keith could see Lance running in circles on the lawn of the dining hall while Hunk blew bubbles from a bottle. Both of them were deluged with dozens of children, shrieking and climbing them like trees.

A few seats away, Pidge scooped up her tray, drained the last of her orange juice, and belched.

“Excuse you,” Shiro said.

“”Scuse me,” she echoed dutifully, dumping her paper plate in the trash.

Keith plucked a piece of fruit from Shiro’s bowl while his head was turned, cramming it in his mouth and licking the sweetness off his fingertips.

Shiro glanced over his shoulder with a grin. “Y’know, you _could_ just ask.”

“Hey, did you know about, uh,” Keith asked through a mouthful of stolen strawberry, “about Allura’s girlfriend?”

Shiro wiped coffee off his top lip and carded a hand through his white bangs. “Her ex? Yeah, I did.” For a moment he stared absently over Keith’s shoulder, like he was sifting through memories. “She used to work here. Used to be the barn manager, actually, ‘til she bought some property about an hour outside town and started doing her own thing, rehabbing injured horses or something like that.” He shrugged. “Allura doesn’t talk about her much, but I don’t think it was a _bad_ breakup. Just… a breakup.”

Keith leaned his elbows on the table, chewing his lip. “Was it ever weird? That they were together?”

“Nah, counselors date all the time -- they just don’t usually stay together when the summer’s over.”

“Wait, that’s _allowed_?”

“Dating? Ah… not exactly, no.” Shiro laughed sheepishly and rubbed the back of his neck. “But Allura learned that it was going to happen whether she liked it or not, so now she mostly turns a blind eye to it. As long as you’re not making out in front of campers, she lets you get away with pretty much anything.”

Keith blurted the question before he caught on to what his own mouth was doing. “Have you done it?”

Coffee cup suspended halfway to his mouth, Shiro paused, one eyebrow raised. “Have I -- _oh._ Dated a coworker, you mean. Uh, no. I’m not… That’s… I don’t do that.”

“Oh.” Keith nudged cold eggs around on his plate with a bent fork. “Yeah, I guess you don’t really seem the type.”

Shiro’s eyebrow lifted even higher. “What type do you think I am?”

Before he actually _talked_ to Shiro, Keith thought he knew how to answer that question, but now he wasn’t so sure. Whatever the answer was, he didn’t know it.

Keith was saved from trying to explain himself when the clock rolled over and several counselors stood to gather their kids. Breakfast was over and it was time for the morning activity -- which, according to the crumpled paper in Keith’s pocket, was Outdoor Awareness. Whatever that was.

“These schedules could be _slightly_ more specific,” Keith said as they ambled out to the lawn, wading into the barely-contained chaos. Lance waved at both of them.

Shiro leaned over him to peer at the paper in his hands, and his soft laugh was right in Keith’s ear. “Outdoor Awareness -- that’s Pidge. We’re meeting up on the hill.”

_We?_

“Are you… coming with me?”

With a shrug, Shiro held up his own schedule. _9:00 AM: Outdoor Awareness._ “Looks like you’re stuck with me.” He moved to swing an arm companionably around Keith’s shoulders before he seemed to catch himself and tried to play it off like he was just stretching. Keith stared at him.

He didn’t want to be touched. Shiro knew he didn’t want to be touched. Keith had _told_ him he didn’t want to be touched. Hell, Keith’s pulse still spiked with annoyed anxiety when he recalled the uncomfortable weight of Shiro’s broad hand cupping his jaw. But when Shiro turned on his heel and the arm that was meant for him landed on Lance’s shoulders instead, Keith made himself look away.

It was exhausting how much every part of him felt like it _wanted_ to dislike Shiro, with his fucking… good boy charm and his charismatic pull and his dimple-cheeked smile. It was exhausting how much he wanted to and how much he _couldn’t_.

“Ugh,” Keith said out loud, and his campers looked at him curiously. Scowling, he waved them along toward the hill.

 

* * *

 

 

Early mornings were cold but the sun beat the chill out of the air quickly; by 10 a.m., Keith was sweating, his red hoodie tied around his waist. Pidge was taking them to the peak of one of the smallest mountains that surrounded the campground, pointing out the species of assorted flora and fauna along the way, her straw hat flapping every time she excitedly turned her head.

“Don’t touch the poison ivy,” she warned, one freckled finger jabbing the air.

Sluggish, Keith trailed behind the group. The mountain was one of the smallest, Pidge had told him, and the incline was gentle, but he’d been a pack-a-day smoker for long enough that even little mountains could apparently kick his ass. Even if he had cut back on the habit drastically.

“All right?” Shiro asked over his shoulder, slowing down his pace and offering his gigantic blue water bottle to Keith.

“Out of practice, I guess,” he replied, struggling to hide his breathlessness. He accepted the water bottle. The stupid thing was so big he had to hold it with both hands when he drank. “Not a lot of mountains in Brooklyn.”

One of Pidge’s campers, Meghan, was walking backwards, watching their conversation. “Where’s Brooklyn?”

“In the city, not far from here.” Keith gestured vaguely.

“Is that where you’re from?” she asked, squinting in the sunshine and studying him. Her teeth were stained neon from the sugary juice they served at breakfast.

“Uh,” Keith said distractedly, trying not to spill Shiro’s water bottle as he screwed the cap back on, “yeah, I live there for now.”

“Just for now?” Shiro took the bottle back from Keith. He only needed one hand to hold it. “Where else have you lived?”

“I’ve been all over the place. Texas, Nevada, Oregon… um…” Keith chewed his lip, struggling to recall all the directions he’d drifted throughout his life. “Minnesota, Arkansas. Lived in Florida for a while. Rhode Island, then… New Hampshire, I think?”

Shiro laughed. “You lived in _Arkansas?_ ”

He took a generous sip of water, where Keith’s mouth had just been. He was sweating, too -- a long rivulet was navigating its way from the cropped hair at his temple down the square line of his jaw. The sweat-stained Camp Altea logo on the front of his shirt was cracked and faded. Counselors didn’t _have_ to wear those t-shirts, Shiro just did it because he was filled with camp spirit or some saccharine bullshit like that.

It was sort of charming.

“Arkansas only lasted me about a year,” Keith said, smiling at the dirt under his feet because otherwise he was going to track that sweat rivulet’s entire journey down Shiro’s neck into the collar of his stupid shirt. “After that, I went to school in Rhode Island, and worked at a farm in New Hampshire for a while. Then I landed in New York City.”

Shiro was looking at him with an expression that seemed unreadable, his head tilted. “You don’t like to stick around for long,” he said.

Shrugging and twisting his hair off the nape of his neck, Keith said, “Why would I? The world’s a big place.”

That was only half-true: Keith’s world had been pretty small for a long time. He’d bounced around the country, back and forth from coast to coast, living with whoever could put up with him for long enough until he sabotaged it. It wasn’t some exciting cross-country adventure, it was just survival. It wasn’t until after he aged out of the system and he’d burned all his bridges with his remaining family members that his scope widened: he had no anchors, no obligations, and no safety net. Any step forward might be the step that sent him over the cliff with nothing to catch him, so why not keep walking? What was there to lose?

So that was how he ended up sleeping on floors and couches, working odd jobs, tumbling across state lines, and making memories instead of just surviving.

But all of that shit was hard to explain, and who knew if Shiro would understand it anyway. So he just shrugged, and Shiro just nodded, and that rivulet of sweat finally disappeared under Shiro’s collar. Keith exhaled in relief.

From the head of the trail, Pidge raised her skinny fist and whooped. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “Blackberries!”

Like a herd of tiny raptors, the kids descended upon the leafy bush, snaking their little hands through the brambles to pluck its fat, dark berries.

Shiro dropped his water bottle in the grass so that he could hold out his cupped palms and accept dozens of half-squished berries as gifts from his campers. Pidge stood by proudly watching the sticky, giggling chaos with her hands on her hips and her straw hat pushed back on her unruly hair.

Still sweating, Keith picked up Shiro’s bottle from the ground and drained half of it in one go. Grateful not to be hiking for the moment, he inhaled breaths so deep they ached in his chest and turned away to look behind him at the valley below. He picked out the colors of the cabins, the frenetic glee of kids on the field kicking soccer balls at each other, the bright red walls of the barn in the distance and its peaked roof.

Beyond that, over the wide river, he could see the ordered layout of Camp Galra -- each cabin sturdy and clean, in long, uniform lines, and painted royal purple. They probably outnumbered Altea by ten to one; Keith was in awe at how far the valley actually stretched, and how Camp Galra utilized every available inch of space. There was almost no grass and very few trees, replaced instead by more and more cabins, administration offices, and a blacktop lot.

He remembered Coran saying they’d been trying to push Allura out and expand, and Keith understood now. Camp Galra had completely colonized their half of the campgrounds. There was nowhere else left for them to _go._

“Hey, do you want one of--” Shiro interrupted him, holding out a ripe blackberry, but the smile on his face withered almost instantly when he saw Keith staring out at the Galra grounds.

“Jesus, it’s like the summer camp version of a strip mall over there,” Keith said, still marveling. “They’ve even got a parking lot. Why would you need a parking lot out in the middle of nowhere?”

Shiro’s mouth pulled down deeply at the corners. “Camp Galra is all about quantity over quality. They cram as many kids in there as they can and charge a premium for it. They don’t care about their campers as much as they do their profit margins.” His voice was scornful.

“You have a hell of a grudge against those guys, huh?” Keith asked.

“Yeah, I do.” Shiro’s eyes traced the regimented lines of purple cabins. “I used to work there. I don’t miss it.”

Keith looked at him and wondered what the hell had happened to let that kind of animosity fester in a dude who was so unrelentingly positive and polite. He wondered, not for the first time, about Shiro’s untold stories, but he didn’t know how to ask.

Usually this was the part where he would shrug and say _oh_ and just let the questions burn unanswered, but instead he found himself scrambling for words.

“That’s good, then,” he mumbled. “I mean, that you’re here, and not there. It’s good. For you. And the campers, too -- they like you. So. That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Shiro said, voice soft, nodding and pulling his gaze away from the valley back to Keith, “it is good. Even better than I ever thought it could be.” He laughed self-consciously, shrugged his broad shoulders, and popped a blackberry in his mouth, chewing on it thoughtfully. His fingertips were stained dark with juice, the same rich purple as the Galra cabins, when he offered one to Keith.

Both of Keith’s hands were wrapped around Shiro’s dumb, stupid, ridiculous water bottle (who the fuck even needed a water bottle that big? The answer, apparently, was Shiro, because Shiro was also big). So Shiro, watching Keith carefully, held the berry up to Keith’s mouth for him as if it was nothing, as if he didn’t even have to think about it, as if it was a normal thing that normal people did.

And that’s what Shiro wanted everyone to believe, right? That he was normal. That he was whole and unbroken.

This time, Keith didn’t pull away, didn’t reject him. He let Shiro press the fruit into his mouth. One rough fingertip brushed against his bottom lip. Shiro grinned. As if it was nothing. It was over in a fraction of a second.

The berry burst on Keith’s tongue, bright and tart, its flesh soft. He savored it slowly, with care; it tasted like a hundred things at once, nothing at all like the kind of blackberries he’d had before. He tasted the dirt it grew from and the sunshine it basked in. It was warm from the heat of Shiro’s scarred palm.

“Stragglers get left behind for the bears,” Pidge yelled as their group started to move again, ambling up the mountainside.

When Keith started walking, Shiro kept his strides slow on purpose, staying beside him in patient silence until they reached the top together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to join me in my endless weeping about Voltron, you can find me on twitter at [@squid_wizard](http://twitter.com/squid_wizard).


	6. Chapter 6

Generally speaking, Keith Kogane was an adaptable animal. He could roll with the punches pretty well, whether the punches were finding himself on the street with all his stuff in a trash bag and nowhere to sleep, or getting lost in the middle of nowhere for several hours trying to find the campground on his first day as a counselor.

Toward the end of the first week at camp, Keith realized his adaptability was just about the only thing keeping him from losing his marbles. Counselors were given a regimented daily schedule, everything plotted out in neat blocks of time, but Keith learned very quickly that at Camp Altea, time was meaningless, the schedules were little more than a vague suggestion, and absolutely nothing went according to plan. Ever.

Theoretically, you’d wake up after sunrise. Rouse your campers no less than seven times, because they keep falling back asleep. Shuffle into the dining hall for breakfast, running late. Report for daily assembly, listen to Allura and Coran give saccharine pep talks which always run overtime, then drag your ass out to morning activities with your campers, throwing frisbees or shooting arrows or tying sailing knots or hiking. Be prepared to deal with bickering, puking, or crying at any moment; on a bad day, you’d get all three at once.

Lunchtime meant cramming food into your mouth as fast as possible so you could lie outside and soak up the sunshine until the next round of chaos started.

Once the afternoon activities and dinner time were over, though, there were no more assigned blocks of time. Campers were free to wander down to the lake and skip stones, sit cross-legged around the firepit, fiddle with markers and glitter in the rec hall, or work off excess energy by running wild in the field until dark.

Counselors could choose where they wanted to spend their evenings, too, supervising the kids as they wound down after a long day -- but the process of choosing was a bloody one, with smug victors and humbled losers.

Tonight, for the third night in a row, Keith had lost his spot on supervision duty in the rec hall after a heated game of rock, paper, scissors against Pidge. _Everyone_ wanted rec hall duty because it was one of the only buildings on the campground with an air conditioner, even if the thing was older than Keith and barely functional.

Sighing as Pidge gloated, Keith peered over Hunk’s shoulder at his clipboard. “Fine. No rec hall. What else is open?”

Hunk gnawed on the end of a well-bitten pencil as he checked his list. “Hmm. Looks like the field could use a few more counselors on watch. If you take it tonight, I’ll rig the competition and give you rec hall duty tomorrow. Don’t tell Pidge.”

“I have ears,” Pidge said, “I can hear you.”

Keith pointed at her as he began his trek toward the field, walking backwards. “Your reign ends tomorrow. That rec hall spot is mine.”

“You’ll have to fight me for it!” she called after him.

Nobody really liked taking field supervision duty because even at dusk the heat lingered, shimmering in waves over the grass. Also, there was usually a lot of screaming. After almost a week of dealing with noisy kids, Keith had gotten pretty good at tuning it out, but his preferred amount of screaming was definitely none.

Just as expected, Keith could hear shrieks and laughter as he crested the hill. At one end of the field, several campers were sitting in a messy circle with Allura, tossing beach balls back and forth and singing a song he didn’t recognize; at the other end, a wild horde of children was stampeding after Shiro and Lance in what was either a murder frenzy or a game of tag. Mouse followed close behind, nipping happily at kids’ heels like she was herding sheep.

“Hey!” Lance shouted, breathless. “Keith!”

Shiro glanced up in surprise but stumbled mid-step, and a wave of campers crashed over him. He bowled over into the grass, hitting the ground like a sack of bricks, as children scaled his body and crowed their triumph.

“Wow,” Keith said, watching it all happen in front of him with vague concern, “tag is a lot more cutthroat than I remember.”

Lying in the dirt, Shiro groaned underneath the weight of several eight-year-olds.

“Looks like you’re having a good time down there, big guy,” Lance said, his shit-eating grin so wide it could probably be seen from space.

Shiro tried to dislodge a few of his tiny captors. “Yeah, definitely. I dunno about you, but I _love_ getting my kidneys stepped on. Feels great.” When his attempts at freedom failed, Shiro turned to dirty tactics, tickling the campers ‘til they tumbled into the grass in paroxysms of laughter.

Now that the horde had come to a standstill, Mouse turned her attention from the kids to Lance, biting at his ankles and feet to herd him toward the center of the field. He danced around in an attempt to evade her, but her instincts wouldn’t quit.

“Ow -- _hey!_ Allura! Help!” he yelped, breaking into a run. Mouse took to the chase, clearly thrilled by this game. “Call off your attack dog!”

Still supine and covered in sweaty children, Shiro grinned up at Keith. “I could use a hand, if you’re not too busy standing there staring.”

“I’m not staring,” Keith said too quickly. Of course Shiro was joking, but he felt that thing in his throat again, something stuck that wouldn’t come loose. He grabbed Shiro’s left wrist in both of his hands and hauled him to his feet --

And Shiro tapped him once in the center of his chest.

“Tag,” Shiro announced with immense gravitas and a sinister smile. “You’re it.”

He took off like a bolt. Screaming, the campers fled after him. Keith was now the enemy.

_Oh, you motherfucker._

The temptation of revenge dangling in front of him like a carrot on a string, Keith sprinted across the field. He caught up to the kids with ease and made a few fake-out tag attempts, unable to stop himself from laughing when each camper screamed in gleeful terror as he came near.

Bailey was running, too. Her giggle turned into a shriek as Keith feinted in her direction, but his eye was on a much bigger prize.

Shiro was jogging backwards now, looking at Keith with a triumphant smile like he thought he’d already won. Keith scowled at him, wrinkling his nose dramatically, and Shiro’s laugh sounded exactly the same as the first day Keith heard it: rolling over the field, loud and deep and golden like honey.

Their game of cat-and-mouse spanned the entire battleground -- Keith chased him from one end of the field to the other until the campers slowly dropped like flies, lying on the sidelines and breathlessly sucking down Kool-Aid as they watched. Even Allura’s circle of kids had forgotten their ball and were hooting and hollering every time Keith managed to get within a few inches of tagging Shiro.

“You can do it, Keith!” Allura whooped.

Keith may have been faster, but Shiro had better stamina. He kept getting so _close_ and then Shiro would dodge him and the game started all over again.

Lungs burning and legs aching, Keith realized he was approaching this entirely the wrong way. He wasn’t going to win this with brute force. Shiro was a rescuer, a bleeding heart, and Keith needed to exploit it.

Mid-stride, Keith dug his foot on a divot in the dirt and tumbled to the ground with a level of drama he hadn’t actually intended, but it sold right away. Shiro skidded to a stop and whirled around, grey eyes wide.

“Keith!” he cried. “Are you okay?”

Keith made an indistinct noise of pain, facedown in the grass but watching Shiro out of the corner of his eye.

Hook, line, and sinker. Shiro was sprinting toward him, mouth pulled down in the most endearing pout Keith had ever seen. He hadn’t even hesitated before he came running: he was _worried_ about Keith.

Something warm and unrecognizable blossomed behind Keith’s lungs and made him press his face into the grass, blades tickling his lips as he grinned.

Breathless, Shiro dropped to his knees next to Keith’s limp body, reaching out but not touching him. “What happened?”

“I can’t…” Keith whispered.

Shiro leaned closer, so earnest, so concerned.

“Can’t feel my legs… I think I’m dying…”

The expression on Shiro’s face as he realized he’d been punked was one Keith would treasure forever. Shiro tried to leap away to safety, but he wasn’t fast enough -- Keith wrestled him into the dirt, tagging him with a punch to the arm.

“You’re it,” he cackled.

Shiro lay on his back in the grass, pinned beneath a sweaty Keith, smiling so wide it looked like his cheeks might crack. “Taking advantage of my generous nature,” he said, shaking his head. “Brutal yet efficient. Nicely done.”

Keith could feel his voice rumbling in his chest. They were both breathing hard and grinning at each other. He was close enough that he could tell Shiro hadn’t shaved that morning. His chin was rough with dark stubble.

The moment was heavy and languid. Something was supposed to happen now, but he didn’t know what it was; he fumbled for it, feeling the shape of it, like a word on the tip of his tongue.

“I -- you -- uh, you’re fast,” he said lamely as he sat up so fast he made himself dizzy. “At running.”

Shiro sucked at his bottom lip, his smile twisting like he was trying to hold in laughter. “Uh-huh,” he said. Definitely trying not to laugh.

Keith scowled, that warm thing in his chest flooding all the way down to his grass-stained fingertips. “Shut up. I won, so fuck you.”

Shiro’s laughter broke free and Keith punched him again.

After Allura declared Keith the uncontested victor, he and Shiro sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the sidelines, surrounded by campers, as the sun set slow and lazy. Lance was handing out popsicles to the kids with the same grave import as a priest blessing his parishioners.

“You have freckles,” Shiro said, apropos of nothing, brushing white hair off his forehead and picking bits of grass off his knees. “You didn’t have freckles a week ago.”

“I do?” Keith touched his own face, like he’d be able to feel them. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do. I forgot.”

“You… forgot you had freckles?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “They used to show up every summer when I was living with my dad.”

He grew up in Georgia on an old farmhouse that he remembered with startling lucidity despite the fact that it’d been almost fifteen years since he’d last seen it. His mom had never been around, but he and his dad fed chickens and caught fireflies and went to Dairy Queen every night after the sun went down and the heat broke. Sometimes his dad let little Keith sit in his lap while he drove with all the windows down.

He’d pretty much lived outside every summer until his dad was gone, too.

“Your dad,” Shiro repeated. It wasn’t a question. He sounded like he was weighing it, and Keith realized it was the first time he’d mentioned anything about his family. Shiro was looking at him with his head slightly cocked and the ghost of a smile. “Freckles suit you.”

“Yeah,” Lance piped up, biting into a blue popsicle and chewing with his mouth open. “You look like Lucy Liu or something, except not hot.”

Keith squinted. “Who?”

 

* * *

 

Early the next morning, Keith and his tiny tribe of children shuffled down the narrow path to the lake. Keith swallowed a burgeoning sense of dread as he crossed the sandy threshold.

“Hey! Red cabin is here!” Hunk’s voice echoed off the water and bounced up to Keith on the beach. “About time, too. Five more minutes and I was gonna send Mouse after you.”

Keith raised a hand in a distracted greeting before ushering his campers closer to the water, helping them arrange their little shoes in a neat line at the edge of the pier. He made them straighten the line until it was perfect.

“Gotta keep things in order,” he said solemnly. “Can’t have anything happen to your shoes, you know? Lots of pine needles and stuff around here. Important to keep your feet covered.”

He was stalling. His campers were dying to go in the water, staring at him pleadingly and waiting for his go-ahead, but he counted their shoes a third time as he slowly untied his own.

Submerged in dark water up to his chin, Lance hollered, “Dude, Keith! Everyone’s waiting on you guys! Swimming lessons can’t start ‘til everyone’s butts are all the way in the water.”

“Including yours,” Hunk added over the noise of all the campers, grinning brightly at Keith.

All five cabins were having their swimming lesson simultaneously, and the din was astounding. Kids were splashing and shrieking, digging muddy handfuls of silt from the bottom of the lake, climbing on Hunk, chattering with Pidge, begging Lance to dunk them…

Keith made a face as he pulled off one of his sneakers, balancing on one foot. “You said everyone had to be here, right? So where’s Shiro?”

“Here,” Shiro said from behind him.

Startled, Keith wobbled, tangling himself in his untied shoelaces. “How?” he grumbled. “How do you _always_ manage to sneak up on me?”

“I finally found my superpower. Too bad it only works on you.” Shiro shrugged, grinning, as he held hands with one of his campers. He was wearing black swim trunks and yet another Camp Altea t-shirt. “We were coming back from a bathroom break because, contrary to what Lance believes,” Shiro said, raising his voice and looking over Keith’s shoulder pointedly, “the lake is not actually a toilet.”

“It’s a big lake!” Lance protested. “The pee-to-water ratio is, like, a zillion to one!”

“Other way around, dude,” Hunk told him. “I hope.”

Keith looked down at his own pale legs in his swim shorts and sighed. “Everyone ready?” he asked, even though his kids had _been_ ready for several minutes. He nodded at them, finally granting permission, and they all took off for the water; Shiro followed, ruffling his own camper’s hair.

“C’mon, Kogane,” Shiro threw over his shoulder as he waded, confident, into the lake, “the water’s fine.”

Keith hated lying. He hated it. But he’d already told Lance he could swim, and Keith hated rolling over and showing his belly more than lying. Besides, the lake wasn’t terribly deep until you moved pretty far out from the shore, and this was the first swimming lesson. He’d stick with the kids in the shallows.

He dipped his toes in first: the water was shockingly cold, the soft current lapping very gently over the tops of his feet. The sand along the bottom was rough like sandpaper until it gave way to silky, dark mud. Keith grinned and laughed despite himself as the mud eagerly bubbled up between his toes in a wet paste -- the sensation was bizarre and a little ticklish.

“Having fun over there?” Shiro asked, and Keith knew before he even looked up that Shiro was smiling. He could hear it in his voice.

“Maybe,” Keith said, and glanced at Shiro.

Yeah. Smiling that big, bright Boy Scout smile.

Keith wrinkled his nose and squinted into the sun. “Are you laughing at me?”

“What? No! You just look --” Shiro was hip-deep in the water, one of the campers hanging off his good arm and splashing with her feet, and he paused to readjust his grip. Shiro was still wearing his t-shirt, the white hem of it dipping into the lake. “You look like you’re happy.”

 _Happy_ was something of a destabilizing concept for Keith. Life had taught him that _happy_ was a finite resource, and it always had an expiration date.

But if it was right in front of him, Keith thought as he wiggled his toes and stared at Shiro with a funny kind of clarity, he might as well drink deeply from it until it was gone.

“Feel free to join us,” Lance called. “Really. Any day now.”

Keith took another step into the water and made a face. “It’s _freezing,_ ” he said.

“Surprise,” Shiro snorted, his golden smile turning a little wicked. “The lake’s mostly runoff from the mountains so it never really warms up. You just gotta bite the bullet and dunk yourself underwater. Do it fast -- like ripping off a band-aid.”

Keith’s sour face deepened. “Then you have to do it, too.”

“Wow,” Shiro said. The camper hanging off his arm doggie-paddled away to go join the others and Shiro watched her go. “You want me to suffer with you, is that it? Will that make you feel better?”

“Yes,” Keith replied immediately, because it would.

“Heartless.” Shiro shook his head with a great and heavy sadness. The sun behind him glittered on the water and he extended a hand to Keith, that long, silvery scar stretching from his wrist to his elbow. Jagged and deep, a crack in the earth. The pads of his fingers were already beginning to prune.

It wasn’t the first time he’d offered his hand to Keith, but it was the first time Keith took it.

His skin was wet and warm like sunlight on the water. Keith stared down at the way his fingers slotted perfectly into Shiro’s.

“C’mon,” Shiro said, wading in further with Keith’s hand loosely clasped in his, “on three.”

The water rose up to Keith’s thighs, then his waist. It was so cold it stung.

“One.” Shiro pulled Keith deeper. “Two.”

“Holy shit,” Keith wheezed, “my balls are like raisins right now.”

Laughing, Shiro tangled their fingers together more tightly.

“ _Three--_ ”

Together they dropped beneath the surface. Frigid water swallowed them both, washed over Keith like a baptism. He held fast to Shiro.

When he surfaced again, coughing and cussing, Shiro was still holding his hand, blinking water out of his eyes and giving Keith that Boy Scout smile. The lake wasn’t so cold anymore, but it was an awful lot deeper than Keith thought; he’d meant to stay in the shallows and now he’d let Shiro drag him so far out his feet barely touched the bottom.

“I’ve gotta go back,” Keith said, pushing Shiro away and casting back toward the shore. “I can’t --”

His toes searched for purchase on the muddy bottom but found none, and he briefly went back under, choking on a lungful of water. He kicked harder, panicking, trying to propel himself above the surface, and felt his foot connect painfully with something.

“ _Ow,_ shit -- Keith! Stop!”

Shiro swam over and grabbed him by the back of the neck, yanking him upright. There he hung like a sodden kitten.

“I can’t,” Keith gasped, coughing up water. “I can’t go any f-further.”

“Hey, it’s okay, buddy, I got you. Just don’t kick me again, all right?” Shiro curled his good arm around Keith’s chest and hauled him, dripping and anxious, back to ankle-deep water, still murmuring, “I got you. You’re safe.”

Shiro was solid, reassuring, his heavy arm pressing against Keith’s ribs. It felt almost like a hug, but Keith let himself be carried despite the indignity and uncomfortable intimacy of it. He was still struggling to catch his breath and sneezing lake water out of his nose, hair plastered to his face, skinny arms like useless Jell-O.

Distantly, he realized the lake was still noisy with chatter and play; no one except Shiro had seen him go under.

They sat in the sun-warmed shallows side by side, not speaking for a moment. Keith felt like he was going to puke a gallon of lake water; he hung his head between his knees, shivering a little, ashamed and prickly.

“You wanna tell me what that was?” Shiro finally asked, voice quiet.

“Not really,” Keith croaked.

“If you’re afraid of the water, you should have said --”

“I’m not.”

Shiro sighed through his nose and went silent again.

Keith was wearily familiar with the crossroads he’d arrived at: tell the truth or lie harder. His pride made him stupid and stubborn. He knew that much about himself; he’d certainly heard it shouted at him enough times.

He cleared his throat, still tasting the lake on his tongue, and turned his head to look at Shiro.

Shiro’s hair was raked back from his forehead and white shirt hung off him like a second skin, wet and almost entirely transparent. A skewer of something magma-hot pierced Keith’s belly when he realized that he could see the outline of Shiro’s defined chest through his shirt, and that his nipples were a very pretty shade of brown. Dark hair trailed beneath his navel into the waistband of his swim trunks.

Instantly Keith tucked his head between his knees again, staring at each individual grain of sand. He was acutely aware of his own shirtlessness and his skinny torso and his pale legs. His nipples were like little pencil nubs, hard and dusky pink, and he pulled his arms down to hide them.

“So, um,” he mumbled over that lump in his throat, “that makes two, I guess.”

“Two?”

“Times you saved my ass.”

Shiro huffed a soft laugh. “Your sense of self-preservation does seem to lapse every once in awhile, yeah.”

“You’re the one who took a running leap face-first into the dirt when I fell off that ladder,” Keith retorted.

Flicking water at him, Shiro said defensively, “It was instinct!”

Keith returned fire, splashing him. “Right, of course. Gotta protect your defenseless lion cubs. Don’t you ever get tired of playing babysitter?”

His vulnerability made him sharp, like a stupid dog that only knew how to bite.

“Babysitter? What, you think I want to be around you because I feel _responsible_ for you?”

“You tell me,” Keith said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Shiro’s face and not the hard line of his abs under his shirt.

Shiro’s Boy Scout smile flattened into a wistful, tired curl. “I will, if you tell me why you won’t talk to me.”

“I, um, don’t really know what I’m interrupting,” Hunk said, treading water right at the edge of the lake’s dropoff and watching the two of them with curious eyes, “but if you’re not joining the lesson, you gotta go up to the office and find replacements. I can’t handle all the kids on my own.”

Neither of them had noticed Hunk swimming closer. Immediately, Shiro straightened up and clicked into business mode. “Right -- you’re right. Sorry, Hunk. You coming, Keith?”

“Not feeling great,” Keith lied. It came out flat and unconvincing but it was true, at least partially. The lake water felt sour in his belly.

Hunk frowned. “Are you sure, man? The first swimming lesson is usually a good bonding exercise for the cabins…”

“Yeah. I’ll just… go grab one of the off-duty counselors.”

He rose from the water, mud squelching between his toes, and trudged up the beach. At the top of the lake trail, he paused and looked back to see what he was missing. His campers were giggling and goofing around, pushing off the pier and messily paddling into Hunk’s arms, where he showered them in praise. Pidge and Lance were demonstrating how to float.

The sun shone through the sheer fabric of Shiro’s wet t-shirt, and Keith saw the dip of his waist, the strong curve of his back.

Keith could still feel the lingering sensation of an arm wrapped around his chest, carrying him to safety. He rubbed at his sternum as he watched Shiro join the others. They rearranged themselves to accommodate him.

 _I want that,_ Keith realized with a small spark of surprise. _I want to be a part of it. I want to be with them._

Shiro turned and glanced up to the shore, looking for him.

_With you._

Face burning, Keith ducked behind a tree and booked it up the trail to the cabins.

On his way back, he passed Allura’s office; she was out in the yard, standing amongst her multicolored flowers, talking to a stranger that Keith didn’t recognize. Her arms were crossed over her chest and there was a furrow in her brow deeper than Keith had ever seen before. She was talking low and fast, but trailed off as Keith got within earshot, looking at him with an uneasy smile.

When the stranger turned around, tall and imposing, to watch Keith pass, he read _CAMP GALRA_ emblazoned across the front of their purple shirt.

_Oh, shit._


End file.
